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Myth, Muse, and Mourning in the Figure of Émilie Agreste: A Study of Her Portrayals in My Work

This contains spoilers for three of my stories: House of Agreste, Flightless Birds, and Smalltown Boy.

Before Émilie Agreste was a mother, a muse, or a dead woman, she was a myth. Or rather, she became one. In canon, she exists as a doll in a pod, a photograph on the wall, little video diaries saved into Nathalie’s phone, a rose-tinted memory etched onto Adrien’s longing, and stories told through notorious unreliable narrator Gabriel Agreste. She’s a beautiful absence, made notable by how little she is allowed to be.

In my stories, namely House of Agreste, Flightless Birds, and the second half of Smalltown Boy, Émilie steps out of the shadows and into her own body. She speaks, smokes, flirts, argues, grieves, and easily spins entire worlds around her. Still, no matter how vivid she becomes, her tragedy lingers. Like the women whose legacies have shaped her at various points in my stories, Adele Bloch-Bauer, Sharon Tate, Marie Antoinette, and Courtney Love, Émilie is at once an icon and individual, muse and martyr, beauty and ruin. No matter where, when, or how, Émilie’s image is never formed in a vacuum.

These women share little in biography, but much in aesthetic myth. They are looked at more than they are heard and they become symbols of everything society projects onto femininity: adoration, jealousy, control, desire, blame. Each of them, in different ways, informs the Émilies I’ve built not as a one-to-one allegory but as facets in a broken mirror. Through them, Émilie becomes a portrait, a ghost, a queen, and a calamity.

All the things we want from beautiful women, and all the ways we destroy them for it.

I. The Portrait: Émilie as Adele Bloch-Bauer

To be painted is to be preserved, but not to live.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was a Jewish Viennese socialite and patron of the arts in the early 20th century, known for her intelligence, elegance, and sharp political mind. She was painted twice by Gustav Klimt, most famously in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a masterpiece of gold leaf and patterning and a visual symbol in Miraculous throughout Seasons 1 to 5, as well as a haunting constant in House of Agreste. In the real world, the painting, later stolen by the Nazis and eventually returned to her family, became a symbol of her beauty and of a stolen legacy.

But in the portrait itself, naturally, Adele is unvoiced. Obviously, it’s a portrait. She’s stylized into ornament, a woman flattened into iconography, and her expression is completely unreadable beneath layers of abstraction. The real Adele disappears beneath Klimt’s devotion. She becomes mythic. Untouchable.

“I want it. How much could it be? I’ve yet to find a work of art I couldn’t afford.” “It’s one of the most famous paintings in the world, Émilie. It’s priceless. And I don’t think it’d be fair to her niece.” “Then I want to be her.” Nathalie looked intrigued. “Her life was tragic. There really isn’t much to envy.” “No, you don’t understand,” she said as she took a few steps back, framing the painting from afar with her hands. “I want to be her. I want you to find me an artist I could commission to recreate it, in the exact style of Klimt. But I would be Adele Bloch-Bauer,” she turned to her then with a million-dollar smile. “You’d do this for me, wouldn’t you?” “I’ll… see what I can do.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 3

Émilie inhabits a similar contradiction in House of Agreste. She is the face of Gabriel’s fashion empire, the namesake of his most celebrated dress, “The Émilie Dress,” which is reworked and paraded through every season like a ritual. She’s the woman behind the muse, but eventually, the muse overtakes the woman. Gabriel curates, rather than loves her. He dresses her like his very own Barbie Doll, displays her, claims her as his ultimate source of inspiration and creation in an interview with a British Vogue journalist. He elevates her into a symbol of his genius and her identity consequently becomes molded into fabric and sewn into silhouette.

And yet, Émilie is no passive canvas. In my retelling, she participates in the mythmaking. She advises Gabriel on what women love and want, quotes Style Queen reviews back to him, lets herself be idealized and sometimes sharpens the illusion herself. She knows she is part of the exhibit. That her beauty, her body, her name are all on display.

But a portrait does not age. A portrait does not weep, or argue, or change. A portrait does not fight back. And when Émilie disappears, Gabriel clings harder to the version of her he can control; namely the ghost in the painting. The muse who never says no.

The gold leaf, after all, never tarnishes.

II. The Beautiful Victim: Émilie as Sharon Tate

As sad as it sounds, Sharon Tate’s death is what made her famous. Not her films, not her voice, not her love.

Sharon Tate has become less a woman than a genre: the innocent American starlet, framed in perfect 1960s light, forever paused just before catastrophe. What holds the public’s fascination is her death, her beauty, her body, pregnant and doomed. She was lovely, and she was loved, and she was murdered, and the tragedy is made more palatable because she was photogenic.

“First of all,” she began, gently lifting Nathalie’s index finger as if to keep count. “You know how my agent called the other day? I was cast to play Sharon Tate in a comedy-drama about Hollywood’s golden age.” “That’s great,” she said, racking her brain to remember exactly who was Sharon Tate. “It’s a big role.” “It is. I’ve looked up to her for as long as I can remember. I’ve always said, if it wasn’t for Gabriel, I’d be living it up in LA, a house on the hills, partying every night. I can do a mean American accent, you want to hear it? “Um...” "We can run some lines together later. I can’t wait to play her, even though I’m not exactly chuffed by the thought of playing wife to Roman Polanski, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 3

For context, in House of Agreste, before her miscarriage, Émilie was cast in a fictionalized version of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Naturally, Émilie was thrilled. She idolized her! She wanted to wear the go-go boots and the eyeliner, to swirl around in sun-drenched California light and leave audiences breathless. For a brief moment, it felt like a tribute to the actress she loved so much.

Émilie, in this story, is somewhere between a B-list and A-list actress, so, famous enough to be recognized, photographed, whispered about. She isn't a nobody dreaming of fame; she’s there, or nearly there.

She knows what it's like to be a woman turned public property. To have people comment on her waistline in magazines, to be celebrated when she smiles and ripped apart when she doesn’t. Sharon Tate represented a kind of performance Émilie once aspired to; beauty without bitterness, attention without the sting. Sharon was a woman adored for being, not doing. She floated rather than clawed. That was what Émilie admired: the ease, the myth of being wanted without having to fight for it.

But then Émilie had the miscarriage.

And suddenly, she could not play a woman eight months pregnant who would be murdered onscreen for aesthetic purposes.

(Nota bene, and SPOILER alert for the real movie: in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Sharon Tate's character is famously not murdered. Tarantino rewrites history, saving her in a fantasy of retroactive justice but even in that revision, she is more symbol than subject. She’s spared, but not centered. The myth remains intact.)

That moment reframes everything. Émilie ceases to participate in the myth and becomes a critic of it, recognizes how beauty becomes a curse, how pregnancy becomes spectacle, how violence against women is endlessly reenacted for art and entertainment and catharsis. She now knows what it means to be adored until you bleed, and rejects the commodification of her own grief by refusing to let her body be a prop. This refusal, though, does not save her. Her trajectory, like Sharon’s, still leads to disappearance, to martyrdom, to myth.

She was beloved, and when she was gone, her image lingered longer than her voice ever did.

III. Let Them Wear Couture: Émilie as Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette, frivolous queen of aesthetic excess, became the face of a revolution for what she represented. She was punished not because she was a tyrant, but for spending too much, dressing too extravagantly, smiling too prettily in a time of collapse.

“I would love to play Marie-Antoinette in a movie. I just… I get her.” Nathalie smiled, meeting her eyes. “I get the feeling you’d make a very convincing Marie-Antoinette.” “And I’ll take it as a compliment… Shall we go this way then?”

House of Agreste — Chapter 3

In House of Agreste, Émilie is the queen of the house. She climbs the fashion ladder beside Gabriel as a business partner. She is the one who speaks to investors, who knows when to flatter and when to threaten.

What Marie Antoinette also was, though, was a queen who liked to play peasants. She escaped the constraints of Versailles by retreating to the Petit Trianon, where she dressed in linen chemises, milked cows for fun, and entertained fantasies of simplicity all while the country starved outside her fake little sanctuary. She was therefore also hated for the performance of humility, for making poverty look picturesque.

In Smalltown Boy, despite being literal royalty, Émilie cosplays a broke girl, and Gabriel (Gabi, at the time), takes notice immediately.

“I don’t hate it,” she says, dreamily. “This place. It’s got that bohemian charm you hear about in the Aznavour songs. Artists scraping by on passion and cheap wine… Not glamorous, but… we’re free. I could tell you a great deal about freedom. And how important it is to me.” A small part of Gabi wants to point out that this studio is a romantic concept mostly for someone who grew up with more bathrooms than family members. Émilie is like a modern-day Marie Antoinette when she built her little farm at Versailles and wore peasant “shepherdess” dresses for fun, accidentally launching an entire trend in 1700s high-society court fashion. He’s seen the glint of real silverware in the few boxes Émilie brought along, the embossed stationery with her family crest. It’s a constant reminder that if she fails, she can always go back to velvet drapes and fine china. If he fails, it’s back to… well, nothing.

Smalltown Boy — Chapter 2

Smalltown Boy was only written once I felt I could finally see the bigger picture. Representation, Revelation, and Werepapas gave me the missing puzzle pieces that I had been looking for since I started watching Miraculous. House of Agreste's Émilie came first, a product of my imagination based on little clues in the show, then Flightless Birds', which was an educated guess based on the information given by Félix and Kagami's play.

The new context we were offered recently has given birth to yet another depiction of Émilie’s character in my story.

She smokes secondhand cigarettes in her husband's crumbling flat, dresses like a waifish art student, flirts with other people’s trauma like it’s an aesthetic. It’s not that she lacks intelligence, far from it. But her detachment is a luxury and she knows it.

Gabriel, in contrast, grew up in the kind of house that smelled like fryer grease and unpaid bills. He didn’t pretend to be poor, he was. He worked shifts, and stared down the inevitability of staying small unless he carved out a future with his own hands. Their class difference is the unspoken language between them, one she occasionally romanticizes and he occasionally resents.

When they meet, she treats his reality like a costume party.

What a lovely place! she’d exclaimed, twirling around the dead streets and sampling a single fry from the family-owned friterie. How quaint and charming!

Smalltown Boy — Chapter 2

She thinks of post offices and rusted fences as aesthetic, calls their attic of an apartment bohemian and wants to live in a Godard film where nobody eats but everyone is beautiful.

As a side note, and speaking of Godard, Émilie’s relationship with performance, beauty, and the aestheticization of suffering is yet again depicted in Flightless Birds. In the story, Émilie plays Nana in the movie Solitude, a fictional version of Vivre sa Vie [1962], and channels the same fragile beauty and performative despair that defined Anna Karina’s character. Like Nana, Émilie turns her suffering into spectacle. It allows her to rehearse tragedy, to play at ruin, to live out existential collapse onstage without having to truly endure it.

In conclusion, like Marie Antoinette, Émilie doesn’t mean to offend. She’s not malicious, she’s curious, and doesn’t see how her presence distorts the room. How her poverty is always a phase, a mood, a role she can exit at any time.

IV. Disaster Icon: Émilie as Courtney Love

Where the previous icons I’ve named were silenced by death, Courtney Love has survived by being loud, brash, feral, loving, grieving, and resisting the saint-or-sinner binary forced onto widows and mothers. She is accused, exalted, and ridiculed in equal measure.

Audrey caught the girl giving her a nasty glare. “Oh, relax, Courtney Love, I won’t steal him from you,” she cackled, stepping closer. “Heard of you, Émilie G.”

Flightless Birds — Chapter 4 (The Brooch)

When Audrey Bourgeois first meets Émilie in Flightless Birds after praising Gabi for his incredibly promising first collection at Fashion Week, she narrows her eyes, sizes Émilie up, and calls her, “Courtney Love.” It’s not a compliment.

She mainly says it because of Émilie’s grunge look in that scene, some kind of jab at it, but there are layers and implications that come with the name.

The name makes you think of fishnets, smeared lipstick, tabloid carnage. Courtney Love is a litmus test for everything people love and loathe about women. Was she the witch or the widow, the muse or the murderer, the parasite or the prophet?

So when Audrey calls Émilie “Courtney Love,” what she means is too loud, too emotional, too ambitious, too sexual, too much. Basically, a woman who refuses to fade politely into the background of her famous man’s spotlight.

And Audrey’s not wrong.

In Flightless Birds, Émilie has not yet become a muse as she is still fighting for control after escaping from an arranged marriage that would have ruined her, and is trying to make something of herself. She’s messy, sharp, magnetic, and much like Courtney, Émilie falls in love with a man who is actively breaking. Gabriel, like Kurt Cobain, is an artist with a soft-spoken center and a gaping wound where emotional intimacy should live.

There was a pause, and then he replied. “(... ) You’re what’s keeping me sane.” (...) “I don’t want you to be sane.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 1

“Of course he is,” Émilie replied, positively glowing. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe, watching him like an artist’s muse observing the creation of her own portrait. “He’s fretting. You see that? The pacing, the refusal to rest… classic artiste behavior. It’s thrilling. Passion like that, it’s… intoxicating. Nothing good ever comes out of a sound, undisturbed mind.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 1

Courtney Love was often vilified as manipulative, some kind of “Yoko Ono figure” blamed for Kurt Cobain’s self-destruction, as if women exist only to corrupt or save genius. In reality, theirs was a mutually destructive bond: two artists enabling each other’s addictions. Émilie and Gabriel mirror this dynamic closely, particularly in House of Agreste. She feeds his insanity, knows when he’s unraveling and leans into it, out of a private thrill. It makes her feel powerful, desired, and indispensable.

What’s interesting is that when I wrote House of Agreste, I hadn’t consciously drawn the parallel to Courtney Love. And yet, the reference surfaces anyway in the scene where Audrey Bourgeois warns Gabriel about Émilie. The myth was already there, waiting to be named.

“You know, Gabriel, I don’t carry Émilie in my heart and never really have. I warned you from the beginning, didn’t I? Told you she was all surface, no substance. Beautiful, yes, but insincere to her very core. And what did you do? You ignored me. Built your entire brand around her. Named collections after her. You practically handed her a pedestal and begged her to stand on it.” “Your point?” “My point,” she said, circling him like a cat with a mouse, “is that she doesn’t love you. She loves what you represent; adoration, power, relevance. That’s all she’s ever cared about.” “All right.” His voice was a knife in velvet. “You’ve made yourself perfectly clear.” “Have I? Because you’re still standing there, pretending she’s the saint you painted her as. I’m not trying to be cruel, Gabriel. I’m trying to save you from yourself. One day, she’s going to leave, and when she does, there won’t be enough left of you to stitch together.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 5

Courtney Love was never forgiven for surviving Kurt. Not because anyone really believed she killed him, but because people wanted to believe she could.

Unlike the popular story of Kurt and Courtney, though, Gabriel lives. And in living, he rewrites everything. He makes Émilie into his excuse, his idol, his martyr, the perfect posthumous love story. What he cannot control in life, he canonizes in loss.

“You owned the 90s and God knows there was some tough competition out there. Do you know what it takes to be able to steal the spotlight from the likes of Chanel, Prada and Versace at that time? You put up a fierce fight this last decade too, and I know you’ve got so much more to give to this world… At the end of the day, you made this happen with your own two hands. She helped, but she didn’t make you, you made your own self. You can do it without her.”

House of Agreste — Chapter 9

When the smoke clears in the end, we remember the geniuses these two women loved. But we never stop talking about the women who were too loud next to them.

V. The Afterlife of Émilie

What links all of these women, Adele, Sharon, Marie Antoinette, Courtney, is the way they persist even when gone, or shunned, or vilified, they remain embedded in culture. As a painting, a headline, a cautionary tale.

Émilie, too, haunts everything. She’s the mother Adrien idolizes. The ghost Gabriel worships. The sister Amélie cannot forgive. Every choice they make is in reaction to her, to the idea of her. In death, she becomes omnipresent.

But perhaps the most chilling thing is that we never get Émilie whole. Not in canon, and not even in fanfiction. Every version of her is a reconstruction, including mine. It’s always a narrative curated by someone else, a story told by those who survived her.

Which is to say: Émilie is a reflection of how we view women and of what we value in their silence, of what we mourn and what we fetishize. She is a beautiful corpse, a golden queen, a dirt-streaked child in the woods, she is a ghost in couture, and like all women who are too looked-at and too loved, she is more myth than memory.

And that is what makes her unforgettable.

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