Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d'Estoc

5. Gisèle d’Estoc When She Was Real (the 1870s)

105 5 Lesson #5: Names can be tricky things. Of course, in some ways, Gisèle d’Estoc is not a real person. The name is—and was always understood to be—a pseudonym. The critics of the 1930s were right in a sense after all: “Gisèle d’Estoc” did not exist; it was just a name, a mask. But of course they also thought that the name could not be traced convincingly to someone who did exist in the real world, and in this respect they were and are very wrong. Gradually the connection between the pseudonym and a real person was established, but long after it came to be accepted that there was some truth to the claims of Borel, long after it was accepted that Gisèle d’Estoc was more than just a hoax, experts have continued to ask who this Gisèle d’Estoc really was. This and the next chapter address this question. Who was the person who was accused of planting a bomb in a flowerpot in 1894? Granting that Gisèle d’Estoc was a real person, who was she? The fact that d’Estoc was accused of being a terrorist made sure that her name was preserved for posterity in the press, as the third chapter has shown. It also showed that the pseudonym Gisèle d’Estoc could be connected to a real person, a person referred to cryptically as “Madame M.D.” by memoirist Ernest Raynaud and as “Paule Parent Desbarres” by Guy de Maupassant. Together, these facts can help reconstruct a life, but it has taken the better part of a century to understand how. Gisèle d’Estoc When She Was Real (the 1870s) 106 Gisèle d’Estoc When She Was Real Even before she was accused of being a terrorist, Gisèle d’Estoc was a journalist with a reputation. She had a reputation for being combative (a wielder of the sword both figuratively in print and literally in duels), as the story of her feud with Tailhade and her duel with Emma Rouër have already illustrated. Part of the reason she got into trouble with Tailhade was her relationship with Rachilde, and here, too, she showed a vindictive side in the publication of La vierge-réclame. But before she tried her hand at writing, she had been an artist, and her participation in the art world left a trace, though not one that was immediately perceived. The editors of Maupassant’s correspondence note that the name Gisèle d’Estoc does not appear before about 1884. Before then, Madame Desbarres (or Des Barres, as the name was sometimes written) was known to the artistic milieus of Paris as an artist who exhibited regularly at the Salon. And sure enough, there is a dossier on her in the archives of the musée d’Orsay (the main museum of nineteenth-century art in Paris) under the name Desbarres, Mme Paule. When I consulted the dossier (in 1999), it contained a black-and-white photograph of a bust of a peasant woman (paysanne ) dating from 1887. The information came from a 1909 catalog published by the museum of Toul (a town not far from Nancy in the eastern province of Lorraine), which lists the sculpture as a gift of the artist. Also in the dossier, a single photocopied page headed “La Lorraine au salon (1re année) (1887)” lists a plaster bust of a “paysanne Lorraine” as number 3873, giving the artist’s name as “Desbarres (Mme Paule)” and adding her place of birth: Nancy. This dossier may not have been available to—and its contents certainly appear not to have been known by—researchers such as Auriant and Armand Lanoux, but it demonstrates that in the art world that paralleled the literary milieu, there were traces of such a person, and they turn out to corroborate some of Pierre Borel’s claims. Indeed, the compiler of the exhaustive and scholarly reference work Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, Emmanuel Bénézit, lists her in his dictionary as early as 1950, giving her the following entry: “Desbarres (Paule Marie), née Courbes, Gisèle d’Estoc When She Was Real 107 sculpteur, née à Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), XIXe siècle (Ec. Fr.). Elle fut l’élève de Chapu et Delorme” (197). The entry accounts for the instability...