CHAPTER FIVE
Pathologies and Persecutions
The evenings, obligatory exhaustion. And what is clearest of all is that I am in the process of losing again the little improvement I gained with such difficulty. I feel as bad as possible. And Nono only contributes too largely to this wonderful result. This child will kill me.
Nelly Roussel to Henri Godet (1909)
The government is resolved to clamp down on this destructive campaign against the French family. Let us think about what [U.S. President Theodore] Roosevelt has said: a nation whose men no longer want to make war, whose women no longer want to make children, is a nation stricken in the heart.
Deputy Gauthier de Clagny (Seine-et-Oise), quoted in L’Accord social,
December 12, 1909
After sifting through and cataloguing hundreds of letters written by French feminist women who were Roussel’s contemporaries, Maïté Albistur wrote that the major event of their daily lives was their suffering bodies: “Their complaints, which run through all [social] classes and upset those in all conditions, fill their correspondence, transpire in each document”; their bodies, moreover, became a major handicap that weighed on them.1 In the era prior to antibiotics, everyone suffered prolonged bouts of ill health, not just women. Bronchitis—to which Henri and Mireille were especially prone—could endure for weeks and be fatal. In the Roussel family correspondence, a nearly obsessive concern about the weather reflected the precariousness of daily health; it was believed that sudden changes in temperature, or excessive heat, cold, and dampness could cause serious illness. When Nelly traveled, especially on lecture tours, Henri cautioned her about her diet, overwork, and keeping her windows open at night to rid the air of menacing germs. From 1909 onward, from the time she was in her early thirties, these health concerns became more urgent and occupied more space in Roussel’s diaries and correspondence. She suffered a series of disorders whose symptoms—insomnia, nervous anxiety, depression, digestive dysfunction, and eventually disabling menstrual periods—first appeared intermittently but later became more chronic.
Gauthier de Clagny’s admonition (see chapter epigraph) captures the new political and international climate that coincided with the point at which Roussel’s health began to decline, and within which she carried on her neo-Malthusian and feminist campaigns: a resurgence of nationalism and all its cultural trappings, which had implications for sexual politics. For the first time since 1870, rising international tensions fostered a widespread belief that war with Germany was imminent. In 1905, France took steps to gain control over Morocco in order to secure its position in the Mediterranean. Germany took this move as an insult, and Emperor Wilhelm II paid a visit to Tangier, where he declared that Germany wanted to protect Morocco’s independence, bringing the two nations to the brink of war. An international conference of the major European powers averted armed conflict by affirming France’s right to exert control over Morocco. In 1905, war against Germany would have been deeply unpopular in France; but this crisis introduced the idea of war into the minds of the French, and the political and diplomatic climate changed dramatically in subsequent years. Even Roussel’s good friend Émile Darnaud expressed bellicose sentiments similar to those that later became fascist doctrine, writing in 1909: “Salute war! Would one know the value of man without war? Would one know the worth of peoples and races? Would we progress?” And with reference to the unexpected defeat of Russia by Japan five years earlier, he said: “Look at the Japanese! What were they! What have they become thanks to war?”2
Germany precipitated a second Moroccan crisis in the summer of 1911, after France had intervened in Moroccan internal affairs. Claiming to protect their commercial interests, the Germans sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir. British-led negotiations averted war, but the effect of the crisis was to make Germany appear more threatening than ever. Moreover, in return for continued French domination in Morocco, Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux handed the Germans a large chunk of the French Congo. The Chamber of Deputies ratified Caillaux’s move, but not gladly. In response to widespread anti-German feeling, it threw out Caillaux and his cabinet. His replacement, Raymond Poincaré, led a national revival between 1911 and 1914 that reflected increased fear and resentment about German behavior. As the nationalist Right became more bellicose, the internationalist, pacifist Left—including Roussel and the neo-Malthusian movement—became more antimilitarist. Nonetheless, patriotism infected moderates, radicals, and even some socialists. The new national mood converged with a Catholic revival in rejecting modernism, scientism, and secularism and helped produce the neoroyalist, antiparliamentarian Action française. Although this movement had little electoral influence, it inspired intellectuals, and its emergence coincided with a decline in the popularity of freethinking, one of Roussel’s primary bases of support.3
Gauthier de Clagny’s admonition further demonstrates how the neo-Malthusian movement fueled fears about German aggression, national degeneration, and unstable gender roles. One journalist wrote that men were being deprived of “the freedom to be fathers,” which was the basis of honor and domestic happiness. Since 1905, the French had also become more acutely aware of how other nations perceived them; one journalist quoted a Japanese newspaper as saying that France “is no longer what it was previously … it is absolutely rotten in the heart; one can envy it for its refinements, its arts, its wealth, but its vital energy is used up.”4 International tensions lent more gravity to French perceptions of national degeneration and infused pronatalist and repopulationist campaigns with more dogged purpose than ever before.
Thus, as of 1909, Roussel faced new personal and political challenges: her uphill battle on behalf of female dignity grew more difficult in the changing political climate. Did her health fail from a growing sense of defeat and demoralization? The persecution of neo-Malthusians most assuredly discouraged her, but her illness had other sources.
The Fraternal Union of Women and Neo-Malthusianism
In addition to her lecture tours, Roussel remained politically active in Paris circles, especially feminist ones. Despite her own radicalism, she readily reached out to and collaborated with those who were more conservative, as well as with the few feminists who were more radical than she, such as Madeleine Pelletier and Aria Ly. The Union fraternelle des Femmes (UFF) continued to be the primary group with which Roussel associated and in which she played a leadership role. The group remained small and focused on feminist issues of private as well as public life and provided a tolerant audience for her views on birth control. In addition to lecturing and distributing her publications, she invited others to speak on behalf of her cause, such as Dr. Lucas, who lectured on his method of reducing the pain of childbirth, and Dr. Danjou, a friend she had made through Émile Darnaud, who lectured on female physical education. One of the important issues she advocated through the UFF was recherche de la paternité, the right of an unmarried woman to name the father of her child and seek support from him (though Roussel later advocated government support of single mothers so that they could be independent of their children’s fathers). The UFF also took up the banner on behalf of women in the colonies, “where the abuses of white men without scruples lead to a considerable number of bastards.”5
Feminists and neo-Malthusians inhabited distinctly different worlds, even though Roussel constituted a bridge between them in the UFF. Roussel played no organizational role in the neo-Malthusian movement; on her behalf, Godet had early on refused an invitation from Paul Robin to take on an administrative position. She did not generally socialize with the neo-Malthusians as a group, though she befriended and met with them individually, and continued to appear with them at major lectures. Through 1909, the movement enjoyed considerable success in its ability to spread birth control propaganda, both because and in spite of important structural changes. Unlike feminists, who organized themselves into an array of groups, neo-Malthusians were a motley collection of bohemian types who focused on propaganda, the sale of contraceptive devices, the sponsorship of lectures throughout France, and social activities such as banquets and picnics.6 Many of them had working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds, and most were anarchists of one persuasion or another. Gradually, they won the support of a number of physicians, writers, journalists, politicians, and militants of the Left. More than ever, the movement addressed workers. Georges Yvetôt, the head of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), was persuaded to take up the cause of family limitation and began giving speeches about it. Educational lectures on the subject were also organized in trade unions.
Although Paul Robin continued to consider himself the head of this movement, by 1905 or so, it owed its growing strength to a number of other key participants, especially Eugène Humbert, whose background and winning personality drew in more supporters. Robin did not have a winning personality, and he became increasingly cranky as his health declined. In March 1908, a major rupture occurred. Humbert, who had administered Robin’s newspaper Régénération and managed the sale of brochures and contraceptive devices, resigned. Robin apparently accused him of pocketing profits from the sales he oversaw, but the breach also had to do with complex personal conflicts and rivalries, including sexual jealousies and betrayals within the group as a whole. Humbert then began publishing a biweekly, Génération conscient, and continued to sell contraceptive devices on his own. Robin planned to continue publishing Régénération, but he was seventy-two years old and ill, and he could not provide the necessary leadership for the new cooperative that formed after Humbert’s departure. Régénération thus ceased publication in November 1908. A further schism occurred at that time, with Albert Gros (one of the editors of Régénération) breaking off and launching yet another newspaper, Le Malthusien.7
Upon returning from her spring tour that year, Roussel had repeated visits in quick succession from Humbert, Robin, Gabriel Giroud, and Albert Gros to secure her continued support as the movement splintered. Though she had regularly contributed articles to Régénération, Roussel had never been a member of the cooperatives that produced neo-Malthusian propaganda. She remained deeply loyal to Robin, but continued to collaborate with the schismatics and met frequently with Humbert, who solicited her articles and arranged lectures. With the reinvigoration that Humbert brought to the movement, Roussel henceforth published more of her articles in neo-Malthusian journals. She also continued to publish in feminist journals, but she broke off relations with the editor of L’Action, Henry Bérenger, and the last article she published in it appeared in late 1908.8
Family Fortunes and Misfortunes
As Roussel and the movements in which she participated attained greater success, the economic situation of her immediate family grew worse. Her small income from speaking, publications, and diction lessons certainly could not make up for Henri’s sluggish earnings. Though his sculptures received positive reviews at exhibitions, his effort to sell them to Paris municipalities or to individuals proved mostly fruitless. In his frustration, he compared himself to a more famous contemporary whose sculpture he considered “very bad.” “Rodin exhibited a fellow with no arms or legs, and he had the nerve to call this ‘The Man Who Walks’ [L’Homme qui marche].” (The sculpture does, in fact, have legs, but no arms or head.) That other art critics considered Rodin’s piece to have “elementary strength” irritated him. “It’s elementarily strong to walk without a head; even St. Denis at least had one, which he carried in his hands [after his martyrdom at Montmartre, as the legend has it], but this one?” He mocked Rodin’s The Thinker as “a sort of large fellow, who is sitting there in the garden and has the air of making fruitless efforts—I call this ‘Constipation by M….’”9 Belle Époque tastes were evolving toward modernism, but Godet’s sculptures remained traditional in their style and themes, celebrating the female body and, ironically, the joys of motherhood (see figs. 5 and 6).
One sculpting project that kept Henri busy during these years was a bronze statue of Clémence Royer (1830–1902). A Freemason, freethinker, and self-taught scholar of economics, politics, philosophy, biology, and anthropology, Royer was best known for her translation into French of Darwin’s Origin of Species, accompanied by a provocative social Darwinian introductory essay that went beyond Darwin’s own work and misinterpreted him into the bargain.10 Émile Darnaud ranked Royer among the three or four intellectuals he most admired. Royer was a heroine among freethinkers because of her anticlerical, libertarian ideas, and among many feminists because she advocated equality between the sexes. Despite her “genius” and her prolific publications, the Parisian intellectual establishment had never accepted her, and their rejection provided even more reason to memorialize her in a monument. The project became a mission for both Nelly and Henri, as well as for Georges Clémenceau, Aristide Briand, René Viviani, Émile Levasseur, Anatole France, and other celebrated intellectuals and politicians whose support they solicited, as well as a large array of feminists, such as Hubertine Auclert, Amélie Hammer, J. Hellé, Parrhisia, Marbel, and Nelly’s sister. This project remained a major concern for several years; Nelly organized a committee of supporters that met regularly. In addition to subscriptions, Henri managed to obtain 2,000 francs from the government for it.11
In 1907, Godet came to the realization that he had to abandon any hope that sculpting would support his family. Although a deeply committed socialist, he uncharacteristically turned his efforts toward becoming a capitalist. With the counsel and financial help of Montupet and Andrée’s husband, Paul Nel, Henri undertook the project of forming a joint-stock company for the sale and transportation of marble from the quarry in Carrara, Italy, to various clients in France and Belgium. Nelly and Henri had gone to Carrara during their honeymoon, and it retained significant sentimental value for them, which eased this profound transition. His sculpting had put him into contact with the Giromella family, who distributed marble from the Carrara quarry. Their business was bankrupt, and with Montupet’s help, Henri, who was fluent in Italian, was able to step in and take it over. He kept the family as employees while he ran the business from Paris. His time became increasingly consumed with soliciting shareholders and clients for this company.
Initially, Henri suffered great difficulties in working with the Giromellas and attracting shareholders. In the winter and spring of 1908, he complained bitterly of working day and night “like a Negro.” He had to make frequent trips to Carrara, where he would stay for several weeks, and traveled to see clients and seek shareholders throughout France and in Belgium. Henri complained of a perpetual and “insurmountable grumpiness” over his difficulties. His new obligations meant that he could not be as good a “barnum” while Nelly was on tour, for now it was he who lacked time to write to her, let alone to respond to her usual requests. Moreover, it was now his turn to ask her to make contributions to his career. He requested that she meet some of his clients while she toured in Belgium. Henri’s success, like Nelly’s, hinged on family support; Montupet not only secured shareholders through his own business contacts, he loaned Henri 10,000 francs, presumably to allow the family to live until the business generated income. Henri was most grateful, and for the first time ever wrote about Montupet in glowing terms.12
As Henri struggled with his new enterprise, Nelly traveled as much as ever. She was absent from Paris for fifty-one of the first ninety days of 1908. In February, she embarked on a tour that in many ways marked the pinnacle of her success. Although she was well-practiced in traveling and lecturing, this trip posed the greatest challenge, for she ventured for the first time alone into countries whose language she did not speak. She began her tour in Lille, went on to lecture in Brussels and several other Belgian cities and towns, and then traveled to Budapest. After lecturing there, she visited Nuremberg and Vienna; and on her return trip, she stopped in Trieste, Venice, Milan, Genoa, and finally Carrara, where she met Henri. Although she traveled alone, Roussel’s only complaints were the usual ones about the weather and fatigue. From Lille and Belgium, she reported “great success” in her lectures and in the sale of Quelques discours. On her way to Budapest, she delighted in conversing with two German men in her compartment, one of whom spoke adequate French. Roussel loved to dazzle unsuspecting strangers. After disarming them with her bourgeois dignity, charm, and feminine beauty, she gracefully set about astounding them with her knowledge, relentless logic, and personal charisma. She knew that private conversations on trains—or anywhere—would resonate, for they would be repeated when her acquaintances recounted their stories of meeting this unusual stranger.13
Roussel also continued to relish her public victories. One of her greatest came in Budapest, from where she wrote:
I am pampered, feted, admired, visited, invited, taken out, interviewed, and I do not have a single minute to myself. My lectures are events. The first provoked long articles in all the newspapers. And the second just obtained a more considerable success…. I received congratulations from the consul-general of France, “happy with the success of their compatriot.” The most eminent journalists, whom one never sees at feminist lectures, were present today, to the great joy of the ladies…. In Hungary they swallowed her whole, your phenomenon. Moreover they adore the French language, “the most beautiful,” say the cultivated who know a lot of it…. How your phenomenon wants to tell you this, and so many other things in person, dear Barnum.
She provided her grandfather with a similar description, proclaiming “Glory is beautiful!”14 After meeting Henri in Carrara, traveling with him to Monaco and resting there for several days in the “Villa Nel,” she spoke in Nice at an event organized by Dr. Danjou, where she earned “warm and numerous congratulations.” As before, her audience in Nice included members of the wealthy elite, in whose acquaintance she delighted—especially that of a marquise. Her grandfather again attended, and he told her that each time he heard her speak, she had made immense progress. “Where will this end?” Nelly queried Henri with evident self-satisfaction.15
Roussel’s question has a sad irony to it, for she did not know that with this tour she had, in fact, reached the peak of her career. For the moment, however, her daily activities continued at a frenetic pace. She met frequently with leaders of the neo-Malthusian movement and with politicians such as the radical senator Alfred Naquet, author of the 1884 divorce law; wrote articles for L’Action; gave diction lessons; and, inasmuch as she and Henri would be spending time in Carrara, started teaching herself Italian. With Henri, she attended a session of the Chamber of Deputies. She also regularly went to meetings of the UFF, convened the patronage committee for the Clémence Royer monument, and helped organize a feminist congress to be held in June.
Nelly did not attend the feminist congress, because, for once, her private life took precedence. She tended to the ailing members of her family, all of whom fell sick with the flu at the same time. On June 20, when Henri was still recuperating, they embarked on a trip she had begun planning a year earlier—while on her relentlessly long and demanding 1907 tour—to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. They traveled through Geneva to the Alpine resort of Combloux, where they vacationed together for the unprecedented length of two months. There they spent afternoons sipping tea on the terrace, reading, and writing letters. Nelly continued her study of Italian and took long walks alone or with others in the pine forests; Mireille and the Montupets joined them for a week in August. At the end of their vacation, Henri returned to Paris alone, and Nelly thereafter explored the glaciers on her own, although saddened by her husband’s departure.16
Nelly then implemented the next segment of her long-term plan: to pay for the Alpine holiday they had just taken by lecturing. On September 4, she went to Switzerland, where, over two weeks, she presented “Libre maternité” once and “L’Eternelle sacrifiée” five times. Meanwhile, upon his return to Paris, Henri set about looking for an apartment to rent. Montupet’s generous loan the previous spring now permitted Nelly and Henri to move out of André and Paul Nel’s apartment. Henri did his best to meet his wife’s request for a “convenient bathroom and a dining room that can be turned into a salon-office”—a workroom of her own (fig. 14).17
Henri looked at apartments in their own neighborhood, not only to be near his workshop, but to remain close to the Montupets, Andrée and Paul, and, of course, Mireille. He finally found an apartment at 107 bis boulevard Soult, one block east of their current residence on rue Michel Bizot. The apartment had two bedrooms, which they would apparently occupy separately, and a dining room that would suit Nelly’s work needs. Henri was quite pleased that it was on the third floor, “not on the fourth floor, like the poor,” and that a cellar came with it, as well as a chambre de bonne (maid’s room) on the seventh floor, so that the domestic they planned to hire would not have to live on their premises. Moreover, it was the least expensive of the apartments he had looked at, costing 800 francs per year. Meanwhile, Henri also undertook the task of hiring a maid at the rate of 45 francs per month, which he thought too expensive; but Andrée assured him it would be impossible to find one for less. He then arranged to have gas outlets and carpets installed to Nelly’s specifications.18
By the time she returned to Paris on September 20, Nelly had spent more than five of nine months away; they had seen Mireille briefly in Combloux, but neither she nor Henri had seen their son all summer. When Henri returned to Paris at the end of August, Nelly asked, “How do you find Paris and Nono?” to which he responded, “Nono is really nice, he speaks all the time about his mama, and says to me, ‘Faut zy dire que je l’emboie’ [in baby talk: ‘Tell her that I hug her’].” In subsequent days he uttered many more such expressions of affection through his father. Embarking on his fifth year, however, Nono continued to be ill-mannered and difficult with his parents, servants, and strangers alike. Thus while fretting over which apartment to choose, Henri wrote to Nelly,
Another question, no less burning and just as perplexing—Paul and Andrée have proposed to me that we leave Nono [with them]—my father’s heart is without doubt stone, because it is not torn at the pronouncement of this proposition. Of course, we would pay them for boarding this tenant, and this would be on condition that they declare themselves absolutely satisfied with the situation … the question is to know whether your heart as a mother is as untearable as my heart as a father. I, who have already reflected on it, think we are going to have a lot of difficulty rehabituating ourselves to Nono’s roguish pranks, judging by the first days of my return. He is very nice—when he climbs on top of me it’s usually to hug me—but that isn’t always enjoyable, one has to be in the mood for it. It’s not that he doesn’t express himself in a very distinguished fashion—I heard him this morning say to Marie [the domestic]: “Ta gueule—ta bouche bebé” [Shut your face—your mouth, baby].19
Upon receiving the letter, Nelly responded briefly in the fourth paragraph, “We have time to talk about this more. My heart as a mother does not seem to me to present any serious wound, … [her ellipsis] but there are other questions involved.” She wrote this letter on her son’s fourth birthday, but she made no mention of it.20 For the next few years, Marcel continued to live with his aunt and uncle.
Once Nelly and Henri settled in the new apartment, their domestic life stabilized. She continued to see her children regularly for meals and Sunday outings, and Marcel usually spent one night a week with them. Montupet’s loan also allowed Nelly to continue the Parisian bourgeois lifestyle to which she was accustomed, with laundresses, seamstresses, and hairdressers coming to her home to provide their services; she shopped at department stores regularly and spent hours getting fitted for tailor-made dresses. They attended the theater regularly (though almost always free of charge, having been given tickets by friends), went to the cinema, and always ate at restaurants on the maid’s day off. Meanwhile, Godet’s nascent business continued to preoccupy him and cause severe stress. Consumers were installing central heating instead of buying marble for fireplaces, he complained. He felt intensely uncomfortable as the head of the joint-stock company; potential shareholders were so “materialistic” that they wanted to be assured of dividends: “they never planted the flag on the summit of the ideal … they are louts.”21
Roussel continued the political activities mentioned above, but she sharply reduced her speaking engagements, doing only one three-week tour in Belgium and three minor engagements in Paris during the first half of 1909.22 As capable as ever of drawing large crowds, she put her usual energy into her performances and continued to sell copies of Quelques discours. The press lauded her performances, with the usual comments on her impeccable diction, irrefutable logic, beauty, and qualities as a wife and “perfect mother.” Her reputation also continued to provoke her enemies. At the Third Catholic Congress of the Gospel in June 1909, M. Taudière, citing statistics that were certainly exaggerated, blamed her for the fact that the French produced only 12 babies annually for every 1,000 marriages, while the Germans produced 141.23
But by that winter, neo-Malthusians had begun to feel the distinct effects of the changed political climate. In February 1909, Eugène Humbert and Liard-Courtois were prosecuted in Rouen. Roussel was on tour in Belgium at that time, and while there she visited her childhood friend Jeanne Tilquin, who lived close to the border in Revin (Ardennes). The campaign against neo-Malthusian propaganda had become so intense in that region, Jeanne warned Henri, that “Nelly could have enemies if she gives a neo-Malthusian lecture. It appears that in Belgium [the persecutions] are even worse.”24
Malthus Before the Judges
The police and courts brought charges of “affronts to moral decency” against neo-Malthusian propaganda almost from the start of the movement. The original law of July 29, 1881, on the freedom of the press made citizens accountable for “abuse” of freedom of speech as legally defined. The law of March 16, 1898, extended the definition of obscenity from the printed word to objects and also made it illegal to violate a private domicile with leaflets or other forms of propaganda. This enabled anyone—such as the infamous “père-la-pudeur,” Senator René Bérenger (not to be confused with Henry Bérenger of L’Action)—to file a civil law suit if any neo-Malthusian propaganda came his way. The law of April 7, 1908, subsequently authorized preemptive searches for and seizure of obscene materials.25 These laws sponsored by legislators such as Bérenger and Gauthier de Clagny coincided with the more aggressive and graphic campaigns of Humbert and others. Indeed, immediately upon the appearance of Humbert’s Génération consciente in November 1908, Gauthier de Clagny denounced the paper as “detestable and anti-French” in a long debate about depopulation in the Chamber of Deputies. He urgently called for its repression, and his proposition received enthusiastic endorsement from the Right.
When Humbert split from Robin in 1908, he brought two changes to the movement that at once gave its detractors more grounds for prosecution and more reason to fear it: his approach became more sexually explicit, and he launched a more serious campaign to spread methods of contraception among workers—the most fertile element of the French population, and the class upon which national defense depended for soldiers. Humbert enjoyed immediate success in his reinvigorated efforts to distribute neo-Malthusian propaganda. He and Paul Robin’s son-in-law, Gabriel Giroud, published and distributed posters, stickers, and brochures. Unlike the earlier Dutch Means to Avoid Large Families, which had merely illustrated birth control devices, the new brochures graphically explained their use, and particularly the placement of rubber pessaries and sponges in the female body. Among these brochures were 20,000 copies of Fernand Kolney’s La Grève des ventres and Dr. Fernand Elosu’s L’Amour infécond (Infertile Love). Most successful was the publication by Gabriel Giroud (writing under the pen name of Georges Hardy) of Moyens d’éviter la grossesse (Means to Avoid Pregnancy) in 1909. This 96-page booklet also contained graphic instructions and devoted an entire chapter to the rubber pessary and its application. Thousands of people purchased this clearly written manual, and it was reprinted several times prior to 1914.26 Humbert sent these publications gratuitously to all the deputies and senators, as well as to writers, journalists, directors of reviews, and members of well-known organizations. He opened a “sexology” library, which, in addition to these brochures, included fiction and nonfiction writings on population growth and sexual problems. But Humbert primarily occupied himself with the sale of contraceptive devices, profits from which helped pay for printing and distributing the propaganda.
The seventh issue of Génération consciente announced the group’s commitment to reaching the most “miserable” workers in the poorer and most overpopulated sections of Paris and the suburbs. In this era of continued labor unrest, and increased international tensions, which raised concerns about the strength of the French military, the neo-Malthusian movement focused all the more stridently on working-class progeny as victimized “fodder” for factories and cannon. In the face of a nationalist revival and the birth of a new radical right wing, the neo-Malthusians preached antimilitarism. At the first meeting sponsored by Génération consciente, in 1908, undercover police agents mingled with an audience of 500 in the filled-to-capacity hall of the Hôtel des Sociétés savantes, listening carefully for language that would subject the speaker to prosecution for violating the laws against indecency. The police admitted, however, that nothing of the sort had been uttered. “They even openly opposed abortion, and Gabrielle Petit herself abstained from pronouncing the words ‘pessaries,’ ‘contraceptives,’ and others.” The agents recorded the purpose of the meeting with words that echoed Roussel’s own campaign (even though she was not there): “to indicate to women of the people that they must remain free in their bodies and only procreate when they want to … [the rate of] mortality is frightening among children of the people in their first year of life … the opposite is true among [bourgeois] capitalist women who only reproduce for economic reasons[;] but on the other hand, every night the fetuses they reject are carried away by the thousands in Paris gutters.”27
As president of the League Against Licentiousness in the Streets, Senator Bérenger had succeeded in obtaining many condemnations of artists and literary figures—among whom he was known as “Father Chastity” and the “Madman of Pasquier Street”—on the basis of the law against “affronts to public decency.” Calling the neo-Malthusians’ frank treatment of sex and their illustrated instructions on the use of birth control devices “pornography,” Bérenger now filed a formal complaint against them. This led to a search of Humbert’s offices where Elosu’s Amour infécond was found, which was treated as sufficient evidence for prosecution, because Humbert had been responsible for printing it.28
In February 1909, Humbert and Liard-Courtois crossed the legal line in Rouen. According to police, they had advertised a neo-Malthusian meeting by distributing leaflets to private residences and cafés. But they also did more: they glued neo-Malthusian stickers to mailboxes throughout the city, one of which belonged to a Protestant pastor and lawyer named Gast. Gast, in turn, filed a complaint to his local section of the League Against Licentiousness in the Streets.29 In the meantime, such tactics proved their worth: 500 people went to the meeting. The undercover police who also attended recounted that Liard-Courtois had spoken first, explaining why workers should use contraceptives, and emphasized the sexual exploitation of women. Then Humbert took to the stage and announced that “anyone fearing realistic demonstrations” should leave. No one did. He then presented a picture, in color, of the cross-section of a woman’s pelvis, “with details of genital organs”; at this point, he declared that the lecture was private and again urged those who might be shocked to leave. Again no one left, so Humbert proceeded with visual aids in his graphic instruction on the use of contraceptives. The police observed that he “placed his fingers in the apparatuses” to demonstrate their use. At that moment, the lawyer Gast and M. Widener, an engineer, appeared, along with the local police. Humbert continued his demonstration of sponges, douches, and other apparatuses. He further offended the intruders when he said that for twenty centuries, Christianity had created a “monstrous prejudice” and shame against “the most adorable parts of the woman,” and that he wanted to see women “redeemed.”30
By declaring the meeting “private,” Humbert frustrated the efforts of Gast and the police, circumventing the letter of the law, while violating its spirit. The current law nonetheless gave Gast what he needed: Humbert and Liard-Courtois had placed “indecent” leaflets in the mailboxes and under the doors of private residences—an act that the revised law of 1908, directed explicitly against neo-Malthusians, had prohibited. In May 1909, Humbert and Liard-Courtois were tried and convicted in Rouen. In July, they appealed their conviction in court. The logic of the court decisions is telling because it recalls court decisions in the Cassagnac affair based on the presumption that women did not have the right to sexual pleasure without suffering. The judges in the Rouen trial found a leaflet entitled Aux Femmes (To Women), which was widely distributed in the hall during Humbert’s lecture, to be immoral, because it contained the statement: “You are absolutely mistress of your fate; you should not be ignorant of the fact that science puts at your disposal the means to avoid pregnancy at will, without depriving yourself of love, and thus to avoid the unnecessary dangers of abortion.” The judges decided that such propaganda had the purpose of “exciting the unhealthy curiosity and awaking the senses by encouraging the public to undertake immoral practices.” They found other culpable acts in Humbert’s demonstrations: he had “no fear” before an audience of “at least 500 people, among whom were minors of both sexes, of explaining, with suggestive gestures, the functioning of condoms, injections, sponges, and other devices in which he traffics to favor contraceptive fraud.” His demonstration of how to introduce contraceptive devices into a woman’s pelvis “could only arouse sensual desire and lewdness.”31
The judges decided this time that such actions fell under the letter of the law. Humbert and Liard-Courtois were also found guilty for distributing propaganda to private homes: Gast, “as the master of his house, and father of a family, incontestably had the right to demand reparation for damages to the inviolability of the home.” Finally, Humbert was found guilty for having printed the leaflets. The decision of May 12, 1909, by the magistrate’s court of Rouen was upheld. Their decision regarding Liard-Courtois is noteworthy, for his role in promoting birth control was the same as Roussel’s: explaining why, rather than how, to use it. The court admitted that under the law, they could not convict Liard-Courtois for what he had said in the meeting, but the leaflets he had distributed—“Ayons peu d’enfants” (Let’s Have Few Children), the same title as one of Roussel’s lectures—made him more than a simple accomplice of Humbert’s. The court decided that the “why” aspect of having fewer children could not be separated from Humbert’s role of explaining “how.” It therefore believed it had enough evidence to condemn Liard-Courtois to a month in prison and a 300 franc fine. Humbert was sentenced to two months in prison and a 500 franc fine.32 If Liard-Courtois could be convicted, so could Roussel.
Unnamed Ailments
As the proceedings against Humbert and Liard-Courtois began in February 1909, Roussel showed signs of weakening health. For years, she had occasionally complained of digestive problems; after she first met Dr. Danjou in 1904 and ate a vegetarian meal in his home, she converted to vegetarianism and kept to her diet through these years, apparently for reasons of her personal health rather than of ideology. But she also followed the advice of her mother, who believed fervently that illnesses could be cured or prevented with purging and sent Nelly to a professional healer, Mme Azéma. In 1908 and 1909, Nelly saw this healer as frequently as two or three times a week for consultations and treatments. Azéma guided her in self-purging, and massaged her, both manually and with electrotherapy. Though Nelly was adamant about sticking to her vegetarian diet, even while traveling, Henri urged her to “gobble down” raw eggs and to drink fresh milk while in the countryside. She also frequently underwent “milk cures,” consuming nothing but milk, sometimes for several days at a time.33
In the summer of 1909, Louise Nel rented a residence for the family in Montigny-sur-Loing (Seine-et-Marne), near Fontainebleau—close enough to Paris for Henri to be able to commute there on weekends. Nelly, suffering from bouts of insomnia, considered her time away a “rest cure,” where she would do no work, and where she would be able to escape to the forest for solitude. When she first arrived, Andrée, Nono, and their cousin Suzanne had already installed themselves. Paula Ripert, a professional Parisian vocalist, as well as her husband and children, joined them. Nelly complained bitterly about her inability to sleep, being surrounded by too many people and too much noise. Even the walks in her beloved forest tortured her, for she could not bear being with other people. She only wanted to be alone with Henri. She particularly lamented her sister’s presence, for Andrée “made more noise than everyone else put together” and “screamed at the top of her lungs about how much she loves the silence of the forest.” She wondered if she had the morale to return to Paris to attend a meeting that Jane Misme, editor of La Française, had called for contributors to her journal. But she lacked any motivation, saying that if she went, she would just be performing her “cancan.”34
Henri did not join her in Montigny for several weeks, because business demanded his presence in Carrara. From there, he wrote to her with deep nostalgia about their trip in Italy the previous year, suggesting she that join him. He referred ironically to a conversation he had with three priests about the curative powers of Lourdes and quipped that Italy would be their “Notre Dame de Lourdes,” where they would both regenerate themselves. But Nelly sought out the curative powers of the forest instead. She said it helped her attach less importance to her “petty” preoccupations and reconnected her with her spiritual side and her enduring love for Henri: “You [and] the forest are evidently the most wonderful of all that the good Lord produced…. Soon, I hope, [I’ll have] the joy of seeing one in the other.” Unfortunately, Andrée kept prolonging her stay in Montigny, and by the end of June, Nelly said she needed several days to recover from the first ten days of her “rest cure.”35
While in Montigny, Nelly wrote the dedication to a collection of articles she had previously published in newspapers, entitled Quelque lances rompues pour nos libertés (A Few Lances Broken for Our Liberties). Although the title used the violent and implicitly masculine metaphor of battle, Roussel again framed her feminist politics in the softness of motherhood, childhood, and femininity, as she had done in her earlier collection Quelques discours. The frontispiece of Quelque lances was a photograph of Godet’s dual bust of Nelly and Mireille (fig. 9), a portrayal of motherhood more radiant than the photograph of Roussel and Mireille in Godet’s workshop used as the frontispiece of Quelques discours (fig. 11). Once again, too, Henri gently took issue with the dedication, this time to Mireille. “You write,” he noted, of the “liberties that she will enjoy. Don’t you think it would be prudent to add … perhaps or I hope [?]” The final version read, “To my daughter, To my dear little Mireille, so that later she will remember that her mother was among those who battled to conquer the liberties that she perhaps will enjoy.” Darnaud wrote the preface to this volume, describing himself as “one of her best friends,” lauding her virtues as a spouse and young mother, and identifying her as one of the “above-average individuals, precursors troubling the general somnolence and pushing the world ahead” of whom Charles Letourneau had written (epigraph, Introduction, p. 1 above).36
One might wonder that Nelly did not include Marcel in her dedication, given that her greater goal was a new social harmony based on “equivalence” and better relations between men and women. “Nono” was, after all, living with her that summer. At first, Nelly got along well with her son, describing him as a “little fawn trotting over the rocks.” But she soon found him to be “like the weather, changing and uncertain.” He woke her up too early in the morning and lacked respect for her. In July, she sent him to Paris to stay with a friend for a week or so, but when he returned in August, she thought his being there would “kill” her. Nono was far more a distraction than an inspiration for his mother.
Marcel may have been a difficult child, but Nelly’s depressed state of mind lowered her tolerance for what may have been the normal behavior of a four-year-old seeking his mother’s attention. Four days after one of Henri’s visits, Nelly wrote that she had hardly slept at all since he had left. She begged him to “bring me above all sleep, if you know where it hides itself.” She wrote that she experienced nothing but “dreadful nights of exasperation, and lamentable days of despondency—that is the summary of my existence—the existence of a martyr, I assure you. Ah! It’s all very nice, this ‘rest cure’! Even though only delightful things surround me—the sky is splendid, the air exquisite, the garden so fragrant—I see nothing: my head spins; I hear nothing, my ears ring; I feel nothing but the stiffness of my limbs; and I only desire one thing: to sleep, to sleep, to sleep.”37
Nelly’s torment made a strong impression on Mireille during her brief visit. Almost ten years old in the summer of 1909, she already started to become a spokesperson for her mother’s pain. When writing to her grandmother, she said “Marcel is still very bad [méchant], Tatadée [Andrée] is right to be very severe with him, but she is unable to make this wild devil obey. He doesn’t spend a day without making a scene, most often about making him go to the bathroom.” And in another letter, Mireille wrote, “I am getting along very well [physically] … this is fortunate, because Mama is so sick that she can hardly take care of me; she has not been able to sleep for a week now, and Marie [the domestic] hasn’t slept either. The housekeeper can no longer come, but Mama says it doesn’t matter, because things would not be much better if she could come … Marcel is still tiresome even when he is good.” Nelly was still ill toward the end of her sojourn in September. Henri urged her not to worry about her health and said they would consult a doctor upon her return. “Surely you will be cured,” he assured her, “and quickly.”38 Roussel returned to Paris in October, after having spent four months in Montigny. Weekly visits with Azéma and a Dr. Bonnier through the end of the year, and a much lower level of activity recorded in her dairy, indicate that her ill health persisted.
The abundant documentation offers no concrete clues about what provoked the insomnia that caused her such sustained agony in the summer of 1909. Two obvious changes in her life may have depressed her: her first experience of having the primary responsibility for parenting her son, and the new political climate that more aggressively criminalized and prosecuted neo-Malthusian works.
Roussel nonetheless continued her political activity. In November 1909, Humbert once again landed in court because of “affronts to decency” in specific articles he had published in Génération consciente. Roussel presented herself as a witness for the defense at his hearing, where she spoke about the benefits that lower fertility would have among the poor. The trial took place behind closed doors for fear of its effects on public morality, but newspapers reported its outcome, and named Roussel as one of the witnesses for Humbert. Upon learning the news, Darnaud kindly wrote that she “must have impressed the court.” But he reiterated his conviction, just like that of the judges in Rouen, that teaching “young girls the art … [his ellipsis] of loving without fearing pregnancy” would result in profligacy. Moreover, word had reached him of her weakening health through their mutual friend Dr. Danjou, and he cautioned her to avoid this sort of activity. Then in his meandering epistolary style, he made a tactless remark: having witnessed the births of his three sons, during which his wife had not uttered the least cry, he did not see how childbirth itself could be a deterrent to having children. Like Nelly, he had had three and lost one—and “like her,” he could criticize those capable of having three children but who “limited themselves to one or even none.” This last comment enraged her.39
Because of her declining health, Roussel undertook no public activity in the subsequent months, but her ambition remained unabated. Still ill, she was then drawn into public life once again. In February 1910, the Group française des études féministes (French Feminist Studies Group) organized a meeting to discuss recherche de la paternité. Roussel was not on the program, but she spontaneously spoke about the need to provide government support for single mothers so that they could be independent of their seducers. Minister of Labor René Viviani presided, flanked by several deputies and senators, among them the infamous “père-la-pudeur,” Senator René Bérenger. Roussel was curious to know what impression she made on the latter.40
That same month, Roussel received more unexpected publicity. With great fanfare (and accompanied by her pet lion), Marguerite Durand announced that she would present herself as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies and expressed the hope that Roussel and Hubertine Auclert would do the same. Le Matin—the third largest circulating newspaper in Paris—covered the story, but when more than thirteen other newspapers, including The World of New York picked up the news, they misreported that Durand had announced the actual candidacies of Roussel and Auclert. The news continued to spread even after Le Matin’s clarification two days later.41 Roussel explained that she had neither the time to run for public office nor any interest in doing so, and that she thought female candidacies would serve no purpose—but she savored the publicity. Her reentry into public life was salve to her self-esteem, which had been waning since the previous summer because of her health. The following month, she spoke at a huge meeting organized by several feminist groups at the Hôtel des Sociétés savantes. The room was overflowing with a “very mixed audience,” turbulent and vibrant. “I knew I was quite a celebrity,” she wrote to Henri, “with its advantages and its inconveniences: the thrill of [audience] curiosity [as she rose to speak], then the impressive silence that fell with the announcement of my name, even though I spoke after others who are so well known; wild applause, and murmurs of protest, because there were many enemies in this frenzied crowd…. I had the impression, and others told me the same, that I was the sensation, as was expected.” Like an actor awaiting the next day’s review of a play, she noted impatiently that the papers had not yet covered the event. An impressive array of them soon did, however. Although Roussel did not hold as central a place in the press coverage as she must have hoped (several articles gave pride of place to the eloquent lawyer Maria Verone), Les Nouvelles reported that her “magisterial speech was the success of the evening,” and noted that the hall had been so full that three hundred people were unable to get in.42
Later that month, March 31, Roussel spoke at yet another meeting to protest the persecution of neo-Malthusians and to make an appeal in their defense. Two thousand people crowded into a room at the Hôtel des Sociétés savantes. Sébastian Faure spoke first, arguing in moderate language that one should exercise caution in the serious act of bringing a human being into the world. Roussel then further explained neo-Malthusian doctrine in language far less measured than that of her anarchist colleague, in a speech that was frequently interrupted by applause. She railed against “the race of Bérengistes” and the hypocritical tactics they used to convict her colleagues of pornography. The meeting grew controversial when a priest, Abbé Violet, presented an opposing view, which met with indignant protests. Faure attacked the institution of marriage, which provoked “a large number of women and a few men” to stand up and heckle him. Faure then withdrew, and the meeting was “suspended in the midst of brouhaha and lively protests from a large part of the audience.”43
The journalistic attention this meeting attracted was more important than the event itself. L’Autorité—reflecting the persistent and widespread anti-Semitism of the Right and its tendency to associate any perceived evil with Jews and republicanism—declared Malthusianism to be “a republican and Jewish doctrine, with the distinction that Jews, being prolific, are assured of power to nurture their offspring … and republicans, by their organization of the regime that exploits the wealthy, have every interest in diminishing if not eliminating those who rank among the miserable.” The article concluded that France’s depopulation, “so agonizing, so troubling for patriots and sociologists, impotently watching the extinction, the disappearance, the decrepitude of the French race” was “the attentive work of Jews and of the republican regime.” Meanwhile, the speeches presented at this meeting were published in a 32-page brochure, Défendons-nous, which later came under further attack.44
Three years earlier, Darnaud had written to Henri about his fears that Nelly—quite healthy at the time—was overworking herself: “You have told me that Madame Henri Godet never feels better than when she is launched, as Nelly Roussel, on a vertiginous lecture tour. So be it! But this overexcitement seems dangerous to me.” Nelly Roussel’s identity depended on her public audience. After months of depressive reclusion from public life, her sudden activity in late 1909 and early 1910 inspired her to attempt a lecture tour. In May, against Henri’s wishes, Nelly embarked on a tour to Bordeaux. They were both so concerned about her fatigue that she scheduled only four lectures in twenty days. Her travel descriptions were a far cry from what they had been previously; instead of delighting in the landscape or in conversations with fellow travelers, she complained of the “dirty countryside” and the “filthy train.” But worse, she experienced stomach pains so severe that she could barely sit up and had to clutch her stomach “with all her strength” to counter the vibration of the train. Fortunately, she stayed with her friends Dr. Fernand Elosu—author of L’Amour infécond—and his wife Thérèse, who took care of her. Henri was so worried, however, that he asked Dr. Elosu to write him a letter conveying in detail his medical opinion about Nelly’s condition so that he could take it to a doctor in Paris. He instructed Nelly not to write to him at length, so as not to exhaust herself.45
Henri took Elosu’s letter to Dr. Bertz Maurel, whom Nelly had begun consulting just the previous month. Meeting him for the first time, Henri found Maurel to be “very nice,” a doctor who loved his métier “with a passion.” He spent more than an hour questioning Henri; he wanted to be sure that his own observations were in accord with what Elosu and Nelly described, and that he was not going astray in diagnosing her pathology. “It’s extraordinary how he already understands everything you must feel,” Henri wrote to Nelly when he left the doctor’s office full of hope and excitement. “I am convinced that he will cure you … if you follow his prescriptions.” The prescription was a rest cure in the country. Maurel recommended that as soon as Nelly returned, they rent a place in Garche (Hauts-de-Seine), where he spent his own summers; there he could observe her regularly. “The doctor conveyed so much confidence,” Henri said, “that I am now sure that with a little discipline and a few sacrifices, and the help of your mother, we’ll be able to afford [it].”46
In his correspondence to Nelly, Henri did not name the pathology Maurel diagnosed. Whatever she understood of her ailment, she behaved with both denial and optimism. Feeling better after the initial ordeal in the first few days of her trip, then gaining more confidence with her public speaking, she ignored her husband’s remonstrances and carelessly allowed herself to become drenched in a rainstorm. Henri was furious at this news and insisted that she take better care of herself. He repeated Maurel’s prescription that she make every effort to be idle, get moral and physical rest, perfect nutrition, and fresh air night and day, and avoid dust, including the rice powder she used as makeup, “a campaign [against which],” he added, would be “more beneficial than [that against] the corset,” which Nelly also persisted in wearing. He went on to say, “In sum, you have nothing, but you have everything to fear, depressed as you are.” She then painfully declined requests from her tour organizers to commit herself to another trip the subsequent year. By the end of her tour, she acknowledged her fatigue and lamented how sad it was, “after having made the tours I did during many years, to be reduced … to taking precautions for four miserable lectures! What a setback!”47
Unfortunately, the Roussel-Godet correspondence provides few clues about Maurel’s diagnosis. The prescription for rest, and Henri’s comment that Nelly “had nothing” wrong with her, but had “everything to fear” because she was depressed, indicates the belief that her illness was psychosomatic: her mental depression caused fatigue, anxiety, and intestinal cramping. These symptoms, Maurel’s prescriptions—even his stated desire not to go astray—and subsequent events are ample evidence that he diagnosed her as suffering from neurasthenia.48 One of the most common diagnoses of her time, neurasthenia was defined as a nervous disorder whose symptoms included headache, dyspepsia, insomnia, painful menstrual periods, and “cerebral depression, sometimes accompanied by peculiar mental symptoms.” By 1904, neurasthenia “was on everybody’s lips.” It was “the fashionable new disease,” whose diagnosis expanded “to accommodate every physical symptom imaginable and a number of mental ones as well.”49
In 1899, Gilbert Ballet, professor at the Paris Faculty of Medicine and president of the Society of Neurology, published Neurasthenia, his lengthy explanation of the disease first diagnosed by the American George Beard in 1869. This volume saw three editions and translations into other languages, including English. Ballet “corrected” some of what Beard said, particularly as regards the main cause of the disease. Rather than the vague “conditions of modern life” that Beard had proposed, Ballet narrowed the cause to “over brain-pressure” (as translated in the English version), in turn caused by “excess of intellectual work.”50 Such work primarily burdened men, and indeed neurasthenia was originally associated more with the work pressures to which men were subjected. But Ballet devoted two sections of his book to women’s experience with the disease, which, he said, had “been best observed and best described by Weir Mitchell,” whose “rules of a rational treatment” had shown “incontestable efficacy.” Women’s neurasthenia, Ballet said, sometimes followed “painful disorders of the utero-ovarian apparatus,” but more often was the “result of physical, intellectual, or moral over-pressure.” The circumstances that created the “over-pressure” were the care women gave to men and children.51
All Nelly’s symptoms fitted the diagnosis of female neurasthenia, though in her case, the source of the “over-pressure” was, of course, her work, particularly given the increasingly hostile political climate in which she was trying—with real risk—to conduct her neo-Malthusian campaign. Ballet systematically set forth and strongly recommended Weir Mitchell’s rest cure for women neurasthenics. Fortunately, Dr. Maurel did not insist on all its most stringent elements—complete isolation, confinement to bed, total immobility—but he and subsequent doctors and health professionals did insist on rest, offered endless advice about diet, and administered electrotherapy—all common treatments for the disease.52
Upon her return to Paris from her tour of the southwest, Roussel immediately followed Dr. Maurel’s recommendations. On June 26, she began a three-and-a-half-month rest cure in Vaucresson, near Garches, a short distance west of Paris, where she shared a boardinghouse with the landlady and several other women. Henri came every week and spent two or three days with her. Nelly passed her time socializing with the other residents and receiving visitors from Paris—her mother, her sister, occasionally the children, and a few close friends. Otherwise, she rested and took walks. Dr. Maurel came to see her every Sunday. In her third month there, she wrote Henri that she had just “spent my fourth good night! Four good nights in a row! This makes one believe in miracles!” She added, however, “there always has to be something that torments me, for I had intestinal pains all day yesterday, and they have not completely gone.” A few days later, Mireille visited, and she then wrote to her father expressing guilt that she had contracted a cold and passed it on to her mother. Nelly added that she had caught the cold “just at the moment she was beginning to feel better” and had then relapsed into sickness.53
Roussel returned to Paris on October 3, 1910. That fall she made no public appearances, but she did attend a few meetings of the UFF, and on November 26, she read a new playlet Pourquoi elles vont à l’église (Why Women Go to Church) publicly for the first time. On the surface, this piece represented the essence of Roussel’s arguments in her lecture on women and freethinking, and it drew concretely on her observations in the provinces of the relationships freethinkers—including Darnaud—had with their wives. This play also represented the deadly boredom of a Madame Bovary, a state of frustration Nelly herself felt with her retrenchment from public life. The scene takes place in the home of M. Bourdieu, “a modest employee, a civil servant, or a well-off worker,” located in the administrative center of a canton—in other words, a midsized town populated with the sort of people to whom Roussel brought her lectures. M. Bourdieu serves as the vice-president of the local association of freethinkers. The play opens with Mme Bourdieu, a young, plainly but “correctly” dressed woman, setting the dining room table for Sunday lunch, anxiously looking at her watch. Her husband, out at the café having an apéritif with his freethinking friends, is late, and she fears the roast she is cooking will be overdone. Suddenly, her “gay, exuberant, stylishly dressed,” neighbor, Mme Rosier (Rosebush) drops by on her return from Sunday mass. Mme Rosier describes the religious spectacle of lights, music, flowers, excellent brioche, and most exciting, a female singer from Paris (a version of Roussel herself). She urges her neighbor to come with her to vespers, where the singer will be performing again. Mme Bourdieu protests that it would be hypocritical for her to attend, since she professes no religion. Mme Rosier replies that one does not go to church for religion; rather, one goes to “be able to get dressed up, to see people, to hear music, to be entertained.” After all, there is little to do for amusement in their town. She pities Mme Bourdieu for spending her Sundays alone and bored and promises to stop by again on her way out that afternoon.
Monsieur Bourdieu finally returns. He complains bitterly that the roast beef is leathery. When his wife attributes this to his tardiness, Bourdieu responds, “It seems to me you can easily arrange not to overcook a roast, especially when that’s all you have to do.” He proceeds to eat in silence while reading the newspaper. When she asks him for news from his morning, he replies “Nothing, or at least, nothing that interests you. We only spoke about serious things”—politics, propaganda—“not women’s business … one returns home to eat his soup tranquilly, without worrying about anything else. That’s how I understand family life.”
M. Bourdieu then says he will spend the rest of the afternoon in the café, as usual. His wife mentions that she would like to go out too, but cannot go alone, and tells him about Mme Rosier’s invitation to attend vespers. Bordieu assumes she is joking. She protests that she is bored; he replies that surely she can find plenty of household chores to do. Furthermore, he forbids her to go to church, because it would compromise his position as vice president of the freethinkers. After he leaves, Mme Bourdieu picks up the newspaper he has been reading and discovers that it features a story about her husband speaking at a banquet on the virtues of freethinking principles: “the respect of human individuality, freely in bloom. It is necessary to interest all those who surround us in our efforts, in our ideal, and render them sympathetic to it by a personal conduct beyond all reproach.” Seeing through his hypocrisy, Mme Bourdieu changes her clothes and goes off to vespers with her neighbor.54
The rebelling wife and tyrant husband had become “well-established theatrical types” by 1910.55 But Roussel’s portrayal came from her authentic experiences in the provinces, where the separation between gendered spheres was far more entrenched than in Paris. It also went to the heart of her dispute with the assumption of freethinkers that women were irredeemably dominated by priests and were “by nature” attracted to religion, as well as with the hypocrisy she perceived in the gap between ideals and their implementation. When Darnaud—whose wife regularly attended mass—read the play, he told her it was a “little masterpiece,” a “fine pearl,” and her other friends paid similar compliments. “What a genius you have for a wife!” Darnaud told Henri.56
“A Jaurès in Skirts”: Revival and Rénovation
Roussel’s rest cure had positive results, because from December 1910 through May of 1911 she made eleven public presentations, a marked increase over the previous year. Press coverage of these lectures, moreover, indicates that her ability to dazzle audiences remained as strong as ever. In early March, for example, she gave a lecture in Gray (Haute-Saône) on “Women and Freethinking.” The posters advertising her appearance had an “excellent effect,” drawing 700 people—including 150 women—from as far away as forty kilometers. Roussel spoke to them for an hour and twenty minutes, and toward the end, she gave a “poetic, ardent peroration” bringing “the audience to the edges of their seats, hands in the air, ready to break into applause, piously waiting for the end of the sentence that was unfolding.” Many in the audience, one witness attested, would have asked her to continue longer. Though she did not perform Pourquoi elles vont à l’église, she sold seventy copies after her lecture.57
Roussel, it would appear, had regained her previous health and energy. Now thirty-three years old, she enjoyed her reputation more than ever, and had little reason to believe that her career would not continue its successful path, albeit at a much slower pace than previously. On April 1, she undertook a two-month tour, more highly packed than those of the previous two years, on her now familiar route to Switzerland, then the south, with her usual long stop in Monaco. Not only did she recapture her past glory, but this time, the act of speaking made her “fatigue vanish,” unlike her previous tour, which had caused so much fatigue. And despite the incompetence she encountered among some of the provincial organizers, she claimed she would never become “disgusted” with tours, because she had “a love for propaganda and travel that had a phenomenal hold on her heart.” She continued to draw sustenance from her ability to dazzle audiences, noting that her “new dress produced its little effect.” A worker in Millau (Aveyron), an industrial town in a “lost and inaccessible region” specializing in the production of gloves, commented “She’s a Jaurès in skirts,” comparing her with the famous leader of the Socialist Party. Nelly compared her successes with those of Sébastian Faure, who easily attracted audiences of 4,000. She also drew satisfaction from the continued sales of Par la révolte, Quelques discours, Quelques lances rompues, and Pourquoi elles vont à l’église; she read her new play with great success after her lectures on this tour.58
While in Monaco, Roussel received a speaking invitation from the newly constituted Fédération des groups ouvriers néo-malthusiens (Federation of Neo-Malthusian Worker Groups), or GONM—whose very existence confirmed the success, especially in the eyes of the police, of the neo-Malthusians’ efforts to reach the working classes. One of the founders of this federation, Luis Verliac, was a member of the mechanics’ union and a former member of the League of Human Regeneration. When the latter organization folded, he assumed Robin’s mission—independently of Eugène Humbert—of taking birth control methods to workers; he established a cooperative to reduce their cost, and along with others, organized a series of public lectures. The GONM had its start in March 1911, and consisted of small groups of workers, primarily in Paris and in the regions around Brest (Finistère) and Auxerre (Yonne). As its name suggests, it had a syndicalist base. It included some key people, such as Dr. Sicard de Plauzolles of the League of the Rights of Man, and Georges Yvetôt, head of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the federation of French syndicates. The GONM advertised itself and its ideology—which included anti-militarism and anti-alcoholism as well as neo-Malthusianism—through its monthly newspaper, Rénovation.
With the exception of Francis Ronsin, historians have paid no attention to the GONM, because its membership was small and dispersed. The police and anti-Malthusian groups paid a good deal of attention to it, however, because they considered it a serious threat to social order. The group in Brest originated among militant workers in the naval arsenal, and the police regarded it as a dangerous, subversive influence on a conservative, traditional, Breton population, with healthy fertility. In Auxerre, the group posed an opposite danger. The population of the Yonne already had an exceptionally low birthrate, and the neo-Malthusian message there sanctioned and strengthened the practices of an already converted audience. In both cases, although many in the labor movement vehemently opposed birth control, government officials soon viewed the network of labor syndicates as a conduit for the further propagation of ideas and practices that would, in turn, cause the French race to degenerate further.59
In response to this threat in Auxerre, Luis Toesca, a philosophy teacher at a private school in Joigny (Yonne), member of the League of the Rights of Man, and former member of the Socialist Party, planned to present a “public and contradictory” lecture against neo-Malthusianism; women especially were encouraged to attend. “Public and contradictory” meant that others opposed to his views would be sponsored and put on the agenda. The GONM immediately invited the “best orator who could treat the subject in a fashion that would not offend the delicacy of the women present.”60
Roussel had never before put herself in the position of debating a featured speaker whose position diametrically opposed to her own, and whose audience would also presumably oppose her. Upon arriving in Auxerre, she wrote Henri, himself embattled with business affairs in Carrara, “Here I am, my noble warrior…. This evening is going to be a battlefield for me.” But in fact, there was no battle. Toesca came across as a fool throughout, further weakening the pronatalist cause in this region. The GONM had suggested getting a larger room, knowing that Roussel—though invited at the last minute—would draw a large crowd. But Toesca refused, precisely because he wished to deter that larger audience, so 500 people jammed into a room that could accommodate only 200.61
The audience consisted of workers of both sexes, “ladies in superb finery, with flowered hats as large as the wheels of a cabriolet, employees and civil servants, young girls, soldiers, and children. And this crowd filled the benches, pressed together, stepped on each other’s feet, … raised themselves onto the walls so they could see and be seen.” And at the last minute, according to police, “a crowd of workers, led by members of the neo-Malthusian group and leaders of the Auxerre Bourse du travail [Labor Exchange], invaded the room.” Shouting and protests ensued between those who thought the event should be moved to a different venue and those who wanted to stay where they were. Roussel intervened, commanding silence. Only then was Toesca allowed to speak. Even L’Indépendent auxerrois, one newspaper favorable to him, had little good to say about his talk and acknowledged that his words had been lost on the audience. Reading passages from the historian Fustel de Coulanges, poets, and the Bible, Toesca spoke for an hour about “every subject but neo-Malthusianism” to an audience that listened in polite silence with “mocking smiles, malicious looks.”62 Only five or six people clapped at the end. Roussel, by contrast, spoke with her usual success. The undercover agents conceded that “at no moment” did her speech “offend her audience, which, on the contrary, applauded her frequently.”63
The press and the police alike noted the irony that this event, intended as anti-Malthusian, ended up greatly benefiting the local neo-Malthusian movement. The police regarded this success with particular seriousness and blamed the pronatalist organizers for allowing the event to be “invaded,” for “the working-class element” had come specifically to hear Nelly Roussel, “a habitual orator at socialist meetings.” What really threatened them was the systematic diffusion of neo-Malthusian propaganda through an already-organized working class. Although the GONM had only come into existence that spring, the prefect of the Yonne subsequently blamed its activities for the very low birthrate in that department, and for a decline of 12,000 in the population, shown in the 1906 census. Statistics offered proof that neo-Malthusian theories were spreading “in the most numerous class, the working class,” a phrase government officials repeated often.64
The GONM differed from other working-class organizations because, through birth control and anti-alcoholism, it sought to empower workers as individuals, and not just as a class; indeed, the individualism in its message made many socialist groups turn against it. Its anti-militarism, however, fueled resistance to the bourgeois desire for “cannon fodder.” The phrase “the most numerous class, the working class” in the police reports thus acknowledged how much rested on the need to retain a sizeable working-class population for military purposes. So the prefect of the Yonne concluded some months later, “this campaign in the future, and by the contagion of example [among workers], may have serious effects on depopulation. I add, finally, that the theorists of this neo-Malthusian movement are recruited almost entirely from the antimilitarist groups.” That same month, another report summarizing the history of the movement and the sentences imposed on Humbert, noted that, in general, prosecutors “deplored the insufficient repressive legislation … as propaganda extends in the centers of the working class and is little by little considered as a corollary to the [revolutionary] syndicalist propaganda; some magistrates think neo-Malthusian associations should be dissolved.”65
Relapse and Resurgent Anti-Malthusianism
Although Roussel derived tremendous ego gratification from her 1911 tour and her victory with the GONM in Auxerre, traveling did not offer her the pleasure it once had. She was fearful that her lectures would not go well and felt depressed when she thought they had not gone as well as they should have. As in the past, her schedule kept changing, to Henri’s frustration, More than ever, he was concerned about her health. She did too much and did not know when to stop, he said, when she was on her way to Millau, “and now you’re going to go and lecture in a horrible place, where there are horrible trains and probably horrible people.” Nelly apparently had little problem with her physical health during these weeks of travel, unless she was trying to hide her symptoms. She told Henri that she was more afraid of falling sick than of any specific illness. More than in the past, though, she missed Paris, she said repeatedly. And she especially missed Henri more than she ever had. She wrote in terms of endearment ever more romantic, sending him “voluptuous kisses,” and he returned the affection, writing of how he “looked at the moon, thinking you were looking at it too, and that our two regards meeting in infinity would create a new star, which would upset astronomers.”66
The summer of 1911, as the second Moroccan crisis developed, marked another turning point in family relations and in Roussel’s career. In early July, Paul and Andrée, still fighting incessantly, finally separated (though for less than a year), and Marcel came to live with Henri and Nelly. That same month, Henri fell seriously ill. His doctor came to their home to treat him with suction cups, a common application meant to draw blood from an organ afflicted with congestion or inflammation. He was bedridden, and Nelly became his caretaker, devoting all her time to him. In early August, they both moved into a sanatorium far from Paris, in Montigny-en-Gohelle (Pas-de-Calais), where they stayed until the end of September. Mireille and Marcel stayed in Beurey (Meuse) with Andrée, where the Montupets owned a summer home. Apparently unaware of the gravity of her father’s condition, Mireille worried more about her mother becoming fatigued in caring for him.67 Henri remained bedridden during most of his stay at the sanatorium, but he finally recovered at the end of September. After a two-week business trip to Belgium, they returned to Paris in mid October, having seen neither friends nor family for two months. Ill health continued to plague the family; shortly after their return, Marcel, now in boarding school, fell ill with a cold and entered the Lamotte-Beuvron sanatorium, where he underwent surgery to have his adenoids removed; he remained there for more than three months. Roussel recorded having visited him only once, the day after his surgery.68
Roussel’s own health problems persisted, especially her fatigue and digestive difficulties. She continued to see Dr. Maurel several times a month for “stimulation shots,” and she purged herself regularly with sodium phosphate. Mme Azéma treated her for neck and back pain. The absence of activity also indirectly signaled the state of her health. Throughout 1912, Roussel gave a few lectures in the Paris region, attended meetings of the UFF, and socialized with family and friends; but the sharp reduction of activities in her diary and the increased number of days for which she recorded only “rest and correspondence” indicate her withdrawal from public life. She also noted a new activity: crocheting. She became more involved with her children as well; she saw to Mireille’s singing, piano, and acting lessons and spent more time with Marcel when he was home from boarding school.
Roussel’s retrenchment from public life coincided with the growth of an increasingly aggressive nationalism that further inspired the enemies of neo-Malthusianism. The increased pressure they exerted on the government to outlaw the movement’s propaganda infuriated her. One of the most influential efforts came from Paul Bureau’s report to the Second Congress of the French Federation of Anti-Pornographic Societies in 1912, “La Propagande néo-malthusienne et sa répression.” Bureau was a devout Catholic, professor of law at the Institut catholique and the École des hautes études, a leading “repopulationist,” and member of Senator Bérenger’s League Against Licentiousness in the Streets. He began his report by proclaiming that “no social ill is or ever has been as serious as the perversion of sexual relations.” Neo-Malthusianism, he declared, had become “not only a doctrine … [but] a practical reality as well for unhappy individuals abandoned to their egoism and frenzied desire for pleasure.” Its doctrine justified “control over physiological activity” that gave each individual complete ownership of his or her own body. The same logic, Bureau argued, could be used to justify suicide, abortion, and infanticide. Moreover, because the “anticonceptional recipes are not always infallible,” their use in fact contributed to abortion and infanticide. Contraceptive devices would also destroy marriage, the foundation of society. “Thanks to science,” Bureau claimed, “seduction and adultery have at last won their place in the sun.”69
Bureau set the tone of his report by returning to the Cempuis scandal. He noted that Paul Robin, the founder of neo-Malthusianism, had not only provided a sex education at Cempuis for both boys and girls when they reached puberty but had suggested that little girls be “be initiated by older men, ‘more gentle and more expert,’ in order to avoid the brutishness of young men and prepare women for their proper role.” There is nothing to suggest that Robin’s ideas went beyond the theoretical realm in this regard—there is no evidence he was a pedophile—but anti-Malthusian propaganda kept alive the association of Robin’s presumed sins with birth control advocacy. Bureau then traced the history of the movement, whose initial success, he claimed, was the result of foreign support. But he attributed its victory in winning over public opinion to the “supple and ingenious power” of the modern mass media.70
Neo-Malthusians could easily reach their chosen audience—workers, women, and the young of both sexes—with inexpensive pamphlets containing practical information. More effective in their brevity than a long book, these publications insulted and vilified marriage, family, individual property and work, country and army, and religion and traditional morals. Bureau also pointed to the use of papillions—the gummed stickers that Roussel had placed on statues in Le Puy and that Humbert and Liard-Courtois had been prosecuted for distributing in Rouen. Neo-Malthusians, he claimed, used these stickers “by the hundreds and thousands”; they were effective as propaganda, because they bore “short formulas that instantly catch and retain the attention.”71
Bureau expressed particular concern that this propaganda was reaching workers. A police search at the Brest (Yonne) labor exchange had led to the discovery of various contraceptive devices, and an arsenal worker had openly admitted during a public meeting that they were for sale on the premises. “What grief … to see [manual workers] put their energy into the service of luxury and of licentiousness, [energy] that in previous times upheld the noblest causes: to realize their ideals of justice and of fraternity [over which] their ancestors spilled blood,” Bureau lamented. “Who would have thought that the capitalism they detested would … easily conquer a proletariat disorganized by debauchery and weakened by the crudest pleasures?”72
Bureau also bitterly lamented the legal limits to stopping the spread of this propaganda. He recalled that in 1907, Minister of Justice Darlan had promised vigilance and “energetic action” to end neo-Malthusian activities, but without result. In 1910, Minister of Justice Girard submitted a bill to strengthen the laws of 1882, 1898, and 1908 against affronts to good morals; the bill was still under examination in 1912. Bureau insisted that if such propaganda were allowed to continue with impunity, “it will become obvious that France definitively renounces all hope of sustaining its place among the great nations.” Both the doctrine and the practice of neo-Malthusianism were “crimes against the fatherland.”73
The same year of his report, Bureau appealed directly to workers when he presented a talk at the popular university of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; Roussel, Madeleine Pelletier, and Humbert (who had just been sentenced to six months in prison) attended. The title of Bureau’s talk was “A Scourge for France and for Humanity: Neo-Malthusianism.” He presented statistics proving that Germany would soon have an army twice the size of the French. Again, however, he stressed most strongly the moral question, as well as the relationship between sacrifice and female sexuality: “To suppress the fear of motherhood is to destroy the home, the family, the country…. The individual is not made for pleasure, but for devotion, sacrifice, and heroism. The bourgeoisie is largely neo-Malthusian [it practices birth control], and this is deplorable, but the people close to nature [workers] will not allow themselves to be counseled by the criminal doctrines of neo-Malthusianism and will continue to give children to France and to humanity.” It is both curious and telling that Bureau and other pronatalists openly recognized that the bourgeoisie practiced birth control but seemed to accept it as an inevitable fact. The audience received Bureau’s lecture politely, but when Humbert directly asked Bureau whether he thought Malthusians should be prosecuted, the law professor equivocated. The audience stood up and shouted that he had to respond “yes or no.” Bureau effectively threw down the gauntlet in his answer, advocating restrictions on freedom of speech: “All acts are not permitted, all opinions should not be either.”74
It would take another eight years for the National Assembly to outlaw neo-Malthusian propaganda, but Bureau’s report and subsequent ones like it helped influence the decision, particularly with the argument that contraceptive methods—in their fallibility—actually promoted abortion.75 But apart from his and other natalists’ ultimately successful influence on the National Assembly, their efforts also reveal the perceived success of the neo-Malthusian movement. A twofold concern stands out in this rhetoric: the perception that this doctrine had reached the working classes, and a fear that female sexuality, untempered by motherhood, would destroy the national moral fabric. Indeed, this latter concern seemed to carry at least as much weight as the fear of depopulation.
The same year that Paul Bureau and others escalated the anti-Malthusian campaign, a sad event occurred that had symbolic value for neo-Malthusianism, as well as for Roussel personally: on August 31, 1912, the anniversary of his being fired at Cempuis, Paul Robin killed himself with multiple doses of chlorhydrate of morphine dissolved in alcohol. Two years earlier, Robin had written, “I feel my role is finished … I must die, put myself to sleep, without nightmares, without dreams, from which there will no longer be an awakening.”76 Already feeling terrible physical pain then, his state of health had further deteriorated, with loss of eyesight, memory, and motor faculties, all of which contributed to a severe depression. While his health and his philosophical beliefs drove him to suicide—even with this act, he did not abandon his highest principles: he donated his body to science, and even tried to record for posterity the effect of the poison on his body as he died. Robin had carefully prepared his family for it, but they were nonetheless deeply moved by his death. Roussel wrote an obituary, in which she lauded Robin as her “New Christ.”77
Only a few months later, Roussel’s health took another turn for the worse. In February, she escaped the Paris winter and accompanied Henri on a business trip to Lyon and then went to Monaco. While Henri made excursions to see clients and to attend to affairs in Carrara, Nelly consulted her old friend Dr. Danjou about her health, and spent most of her time resting. Meanwhile, Marguerite Durand wrote to her about the performance of Maurice Donnay’s Les Éclaireuses (loosely translated, “Women Trailblazers”), a play whose main character was one of the first Frenchwomen to receive a baccalauréat. Married to a tyrant, the heroine divorced him and took up a life of independence and friendships with other independent, professional women. To celebrate the fiftieth performance of the widely acclaimed play, Durand organized a panel of “real” éclaireuses, with herself, Roussel, Maria Vérone and Suzanne Grinberg (both lawyers), and Mme Cayrol (a doctor). Each participant was to speak for ten to fifteen minutes. Durand wanted Roussel to take as her subject “woman in the battle against the human misfortunes for which feminism can have a powerful influence, such as the battle against the misery of alcoholism and war.” Durand was “enchanted” that Roussel was resting, but nonetheless urged her to “enter into the battle” at the Théatre Marigny, where the play had opened with brilliant success, with President Raymond Poincaré in attendance. Durand assured her that there would be a “rich and elegant” audience, one that held “fashionable teas.”78
Roussel finally accepted with deep reluctance. One account of the event noted of Roussel’s presentation, “To speak after Maria Vérone was not an easy task. Applause punctuated almost every sentence of Nelly Roussel’s … she spoke magnificently. When she spoke of the horrors of war, and women’s role in leading the reign of peace, she was greeted with wild applause.” Another account, this one authored by a woman and supremely sarcastic, said of Roussel, “It was certainly with premeditation that this éclaireuse put a large black lace scarf on her shoulders to ensure that her indispensable gestures would take off in flight. And in this pathetic fashion, she supplicated men to give women power.” Most newspaper accounts were positive. Roussel’s own description revealed, not only the difficulty this performance posed for her, but the measure to which performance influenced her mental and physical state: she had been “dazed, stupefied, overwhelmed by fatigue,” she wrote to Godet. “I went there as I would go to the scaffold; as always, as soon as I felt myself on stage … I recovered all my lucidity and all my composure.”79
This event had significance well beyond Nelly Roussel’s subjective experience. The play featured female characters who were not only independent in their professions but sexually independent as well—women who exemplified natalists’ worst fears. After her divorce, the heroine’s female doctor—herself unmarried and with a lover—advises her patient that she has physical needs requiring gratification; the heroine then takes a lover. The popularity of this play, with its explicit female sexual liberation, simply confirmed Bureau’s assessment that neo-Malthusianism had “conquered public opinion.” But also noteworthy is the fact that Durand asked Roussel to deliver a pacifist message rather than the one about “conscious motherhood,” for which she was best known. The increasingly bellicose national and international climate may have justified Durand’s choice. The audience of givers of “fashionable teas,” moreover, might not have so easily applauded Roussel’s rhetoric about control over reproduction, even though it was a theme more relevant to the play than pacifism. The Doll’s House theme of rebel wife had become widely acceptable in France, however, and received official support from members of the government during a period considered the height of French feminism.80 But the tide was rising against neo-Malthusianism, and French feminism would meet similar challenges.
The energy Roussel derived from the stage did not last. From the beginning of April—traditionally a month of lecture tours for her—her health took a turn for the worse, and she did little more than rest, often in bed. On May 21, 1913, she entered Humilimont, a sanatorium in Switzerland, for a cure she and Godet could ill afford. Initially, Nelly felt deep repulsion for her surroundings, in part because the sanatorium was run by nuns. From the outset, Henri wrote loving, encouraging letters that included much about Mireille (Marcel was in boarding school), detailed descriptions of his meals (no doubt to encourage her appetite), and stories about her sister Andrée’s air-headed antics—she was now reconciled with her husband Paul and the mother of a year-old son, Jean. His letters also suggest the gravity of her state. “In effect,” he said, “you must have been a grotesque figure upon arriving, and the doctor did well not to delay it.” He and other family members insisted that she move to a nicer, more expensive room.81
Nelly remained in the sanatorium until October 20, a total of five months. Henri visited her occasionally, sometimes staying for an entire week. In between visits, he experienced deep loneliness and wrote romantic letters in which he told her, in unusually explicit terms, how much he wanted to make love to her.82 She, meanwhile, underwent a regime of diet, showers, bathing, milk cures, and walks, and formed enduring friendships with the other patients. Her stay in the sanatorium, in addition to Henri’s sluggish business, took a harsh financial toll on them. By the end of the year, they were nearly broke. Moreover, within a month of her return to Paris, Henri had to go to Carrara, where he remained until mid January, thus renewing their long separation. Roussel’s symptoms persisted—she complained of headaches, digestive problems, arthritis, and “sclerosis”—apparently from poor circulation—and she continued to purge herself with various substances. In January, she wrote of how much she wanted to be “cured” prior to Henri’s return, and said: “Now that I am better, I no longer have any scruples in telling you that I was atrociously sick, more sick than ever. I didn’t dare write to you, not wanting to worry you, [not wanting you to] see in my letters my infinite discouragement and my frightening despair.” Her despair came after she had written of her wishes for “a year of sun, from every point of view” on New Year’s Day, 1914.83
Misdiagnoses and Missed Diagnoses
Roussel suffered from abdominal and digestive disorders, as well as insomnia, acute anxiety, depression, and menstrual pain during the last twelve years of her life. The symptoms fluctuated, however, and were not always acute—she had good days and bad, and her mental and physical states were closely intertwined. Apart from insomnia, the symptom she most frequently mentioned was intestinal pain, which showed its first acute signs in 1910—a symptom in keeping with the popular diagnosis of neurasthenia, as were several of her other symptoms. Some of the remedies Roussel pursued did seem to help at times, but the persistence, and indeed aggravation of her symptoms caused her and those around her further distress. The cure most frequently prescribed for her—rest—suggests Roussel’s doctors believed that mental and physical fatigue (neurasthenia) caused other symptoms. But what if they had the etiology of her disease reversed? What if Roussel’s intestinal pain was the sign of a real physical disorder that not only remained undiagnosed but itself caused her other symptoms—indigestion, insomnia, depression—for the last twelve years of her life?
A few months prior to her death in 1922, Roussel was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. Her doctor told her that the disease had come from her stomach disorders. Although tuberculosis primarily attacks the lungs, the medical and scientific world had known since the early nineteenth century that tuberculosis could originate in and attack any number of organs. The problem with extrapulmonary tuberculosis—then and now—is that it is exceedingly difficult to diagnose. Since the origin of Roussel’s tuberculosis was in her digestive system, it is logical to deduce that the recurrent digestive disorders from which she suffered beginning around 1910, later followed by other symptoms, might have been caused by abdominal tuberculosis. The term applies to several different possible sites of infection in the abdomen, and it is impossible to know precisely which of her organs might have been attacked. But many of the symptoms she described match those in current clinical textbooks.84
Abdominal tuberculosis is a comparatively rare form of the disease. From 1975 to 1990, for example, it constituted only 3.6 percent of the total number of extrapulmonary tuberculosis cases in the United States. Even today, it is difficult to ascertain its patterns and symptoms. Its primary source is bovine, coming from the bacteria in unpasteurized milk. Thus it was more prevalent in the past, but because it was impossible to detect, its symptoms were attributed to other disorders. Ironically, Roussel may have been infected by one of the “milk cures” in which she so often indulged at dairy farms, where she drank unpasteurized milk, straight from the cow. Today, abdominal tuberculosis is treated with chemotherapy. Even if it had been more readily detectable in the early twentieth century, there would have been no cure for it.
In her pursuit of a cure for an illness she and everyone else misunderstood, as in her relentless pursuit to relieve female pain more generally, Roussel never lost faith in science. La Faute d’Eve (Eve’s Fault), another short play she wrote in 1913, which was performed only for private audiences, embodies that faith—and her knowledge that progress could not come without struggle.85 The “Eve” in this play is very different from the one in Par la révolte. Rather than being a victim of institutional oppression, this heroine is already liberated, and she is eager to enter into battle from the outset. The play begins with Eve complaining to Adam of her boredom in their perfect Paradise. She has carefully examined each flower to try to perceive its soul and the source of its perfume. She has explored all of Paradise in the same manner, and now that she is finished, nothing more can hold her interest—nothing new will reveal itself to her. Only one thing tempts Eve, and that is the beautiful, mysterious, and forbidden flower of science.
Against Adam’s protests and to his deep anguish, Eve picks the forbidden flower and smells it; the world about her transforms completely. Suddenly, it is complex and fascinating. “We thought we could see, but we were blind! We thought we knew the limits of the world, but the world is infinite,” Eve shouts. Initially terrified, then curious, Adam also smells the flower—but as he does, with a clap of thunder, an Angel appears to tell them that because they have disobeyed the Lord, they will now suffer fear, hunger, and cold; they will live among unchained instincts, blind forces, and countless perils. Adam falls to his knees in supplication, bursting into tears of regret and anger at Eve, the temptress. Resolute and proud, Eve says, “No, Adam, I saved us. Stand up…. What is called punishment, I call deliverance.” Taking his hand and leading him, she continues, “Let us enter fearlessly and without regret into the immense, unknown world.” She beckons him to follow her to the battles that murder, the anguish that tortures, the love that consoles, toward pain and toward hope. “Come! We have not yet lived; we are going to live.” Upright, proud, holding hands, eyes looking into the distance, they pass in front of the immobile and implacable angel.
When Roussel wrote this play, she did not know that she had yet to face the greatest personal and political battles of her life, and that France was about to enter a war—a new “unknown world”—that would destroy her faith in science and progress.
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