NAME: Simone Laroux AGE: 42 FACECLAIM: Florence Welch RELATION TO CLEMENTINE: Maternal Aunt/Legal Guardian
Simone Laroux never pictured herself having children. Five years her only sister’s senior, Simone was the perfect opposite of Saison, who’s only dream was to meet the perfect man and nurture a brood of loving children. Never married, Simone took her substantial cut of their deceased parent’s real estate fortune and used it to buy herself a chateau in Lyon that wouldn’t see much use until her sister’s death.
She was in French Polynesia on the island of Taha’a when she heard the news that her sister was in labor. Some twenty hours later, she received a wire from the doctor presiding over Saison’s delivery informing her that her sister had passed and that in her dying breath, she’d asked that someone attempt to contact Simone once more. Simone arrived back at her estate with an answering machine full of messages from her baby sister that had been left over the course of her travels and a heavy heart. In the time that she’d been gone, Saison’s life had only gotten harder and Simone hadn’t been there to pick her up. In her grief, Simone turned to the bottle and started her younger sister’s messages from the very beginning.
At the first sign of pregnancy, Olivier Markez--Saison’s long time beau--left the young witch on her own to raise the child she was expecting. Their child. With Olivier off-the-grid and no remaining family to care for the newborn, Simone filed for the adoption of the child, who she would soon name Clementine, after she and Saison’s maternal grandmother, who’d been their favorite family member.
While Simone Laroux wholeheartedly accepted her role as Clementine’s pseudo-mother after the death of her sister, the bottle cradling socialite pampered Clementine with the sort of affection that was expected from a friend, rather than a parent, which led to a lack of structure and rules in the young girl’s childhood. Aside from the newly introduced parental aspect in her life, she found herself longing for the freedom she once had before she took in her niece. As Clementine aged from baby to infant, then from toddler to child, Simone wasn’t sure how to explain the unfortunate circumstances of her upbringing to the wide eyed youth, so it wasn’t until Clementine was seven years old that her aunt explained that she wasn’t her mother. Noticing the girl’s confusion and befuddlement, Simone took the massive change in the young girl’s life as an opportunity to uproot from the Laroux Manor that she’d been so desperately trying to escape since Clementine’s birth. To shake things up, Simone pulled Clementine from her private school in Lyons and took to home-schooling her while they traveled from country to country in Simone’s efforts to raise her pseudo-child with more culture and grace than she’d been offered growing up.
And so the Laroux women spent the next two years dragging her adolescent niece from one destination to another, and it was during a visit to Helsinki that Clementine discovered her magical ability, much to Simone’s excitement. Though she was enjoying spending extra time with her niece, Simone readily sent the young girl off to her alma mater the following year, knowing that Clementine’s time at Beauxbatons would be the perfect opportunity to travel alone again.
Despite their distance during the school year (whether it’s the seven hours from Pyrenees to Lyon or Beauxbatons to wherever it is Simone is currently staying), Simone continues to be Clementine’s biggest fan, and it’s because of her free-spirited aunt that Clementine is the way she is. Previous emotional turmoil aside, Simone has taught her to always look on the brighter side of things, and as long as she’s still receiving post cards from the older Laroux woman, she knows things are still pretty bright.