Woman in Battle Dress: Henriette Faber on board the schooner Collector

Like most cross-dressers, Henriette Faber approached life with a vengeance. Born in Switzerland in 1791, she was a resourceful person who married an official of Napoleon’s Grande Armée and watched him die in battle. No sooner had she been widowed than she assumed a male identity, in part to study medicine at the Université de Paris. A surgeon in the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, she was transferred to the Iberian Peninsula, became a prisoner of Wellington’s troops at the Battle of Vitoria, and served on the staff of a hospital at Miranda de Ebro. After the 1814 armistice Faber decided to settle in the Caribbean, first on the island of Guadeloupe, then in Cuba, where she practiced medicine in Baracoa. There, in 1819, she was remarried—to a woman, Juana de León, and signed the marriage certificate Enrique Faber. Four years later her true identity caused a huge scandal. She was tried, found guilty of “imposture,” and sentenced to four years in a women’s hospital in Havana. She repeatedly tried to escape and, as a result, was expelled from Cuba to New Orleans, where the sequel to her odyssey is impossible to trace. The following is the opening chapter of Henriette Faber’s fictional memoir, to be published in 2001.

—The Editors

Well then, in three days you’re going to get off the boat in New Orleans. Four at the most, if the wind begins to fail. There are trips that should never end, and this is one of them. No matter how you try to cheer yourself up, you will not discover a reason why anyone there should look more kindly on you than they did in the Cuban cities. What they know about you in New Orleans is nothing more than hearsay, rumors spread by people coming from Havana: the gossip of sailors and traders who seek attention by finding a storm in every drizzle and a brutal murder in the death of a hen. Heaven knows what outrageous tales they’re telling of you there! If there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that the dock will be crowded with curious and insulting people. There won’t be any lack of spitting, or of eggs and rotten vegetables raining down on you. Someone will even try to pinch your behind or scratch your face. Master and slave, lawyer and barber, tailor and shoemaker—all of them will pelt you with their own shortcomings and resentment. The saddest thing of all is that there are sure to be good women in the crowd who will point their fingers at you innocently. With their minds oppressed by ignorance and prejudice, they’ll see you as a shameless foreigner, a reprehensible example, never as a friend. You’re quite familiar with their accusing cries. They’ve followed you all over Cuba, from Santiago to Havana. Except now they’ll humiliate you in English and even French, your very own tongue. The moment you fear the most, the one now beginning to obsess you, is the time of disembarking, your first steps on the pier, first venture among those looks that try to strip you bare. Now more than ever, you understand the pitiless humiliations that so many women have felt when, forced to walk in front of a crowd stirred up by a likely spectacle, they’ve gone forth to their encounter with the stake or the guillotine, the noose or the headsman’s ax. It’s true that no one has talked of putting you to death, but they have excoriated you so many times that the thought of walking again before a snarling public has become unbearable to you. No matter that you’ve seen what you’ve seen in war—the battlefields of Austria, Russia, Spain—you haven’t grown indifferent to callousness, especially among cultured people. And the New Orleans poet-satirists will have their couplets ready by now. Hoping to shine, they await you with impatience. Then they’ll publish...