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

6. Gisèle d’Estoc and Who She Wasn’t (the 1960s)

131 6 Gisèle d’Estoc and Who She Wasn’t (the 1960s) Lesson #6: It often turns out that you find (only) what you expect. Despite the protests of the willfully ignorant critics who insisted that d’Estoc was no more than a hoax, that such a person simply didn’t exist, this book has demonstrated that someone known as Gisèle d’Estoc not only can be shown to have existed, but that quite a great deal can be discovered about her, even today when the trail has gone somewhat cold. Thanks to records of all kinds (historical records, catalogs, books and manuscripts), it is possible to trace her life back from the time of her death to her hometown of Nancy with relative ease. Along the way we have learned things about her career as an artist and her short-lived marriage. It remains only to establish the details of her birth and our mission is complete. But it was on this last leg of the journey that some biographers went most astray, and not because they were invested in denial but precisely perhaps because they wanted so badly to find her. This chapter tells the story of how her birthday was discovered and a “real” name attached to the pseudonym of Gisèle d’Estoc. Only it turned out to be the wrong name at first. In the 1960s a respected French critic, Armand Lanoux, announced in print that he had succeeded in identifying Gisèle d’Estoc as Marie Elise Courbe, born in Nancy in 1863.1 This identification lasted well into the twentieth century (and in some places it is still how she is identified). Here the attentive reader of this book will notice that simple math throws up an obvious problem with this identifi- 132 Gisèle d’Estoc and Who She Wasn’t cation. Something is not right about the picture: we (you and I) now know that the person later known as Gisèle d’Estoc first exhibits at the Paris Salon in 1869. If a six-year-old (one born in 1863) were to achieve this distinction there surely would have been a mention of such genius somewhere in the history books. In retrospect, it seems obvious that these two dates—born 1863, exhibiting 1869—produce an impossible narrative, but Armand Lanoux and his cohort did not have all the information to hand. The details of Gisèle d’Estoc’s artistic career, while known (or at least available in print) to the art world, were unknown to literary critic Lanoux, for example. Still, Lanoux could have seen some of the inconsistencies that were emerging, and sorting out why the problems were not immediately apparent raises questions about how assumptions one is not even aware of making can affect the way research is conducted. Very little in the humanities comes from “new” knowledge, at least in the way that word is used in some of the sciences, where discovering things about the world (genes, antibiotics, new planets) is often the goal. Perhaps (re)discovering the true identity of Gisèle d’Estoc counts as new knowledge, but the interest of the fact is not so much the little nugget of knowledge as it is the journey to its discovery (the story of the story). Rather than producing a new object, the humanities often suggest new ways of looking at old things that have been known for a long time, but known imperfectly or known differently. New insight is based on challenging old assumptions, but one cannot challenge everything all at once (the Archimedean principle that to move the earth off course you must be standing on something other than the earth), so the trick is in knowing what to keep and what to change in the new paradigm. What sometimes gets in the way of seeing things differently is the kind of automatic thinking that makes us stay in the same familiar ruts, the mental cruise control that is our “default” mode of being . Once paths of thought are established, it is sometimes difficult to change tracks, even to see that another way is possible. Automatic thinking is not a problem limited to biographical enterprises, however , nor even to the humanities, but rather is part of the human condi- Gisèle d’Estoc and Who She Wasn’t 133 tion, rooted in the structures of thought in everyday...