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

3. A Storm in a Teacup and a Bomb in aFlowerpot (the 1890s)

53 3 A Storm in a Teacup and a Bomb in a Flowerpot (the 1890s) Lesson #3: Think hard before taking someone else’s word for it. The fact that the literary critics of the 1930s could not establish once and for all that Gisèle d’Estoc was indisputably the author of the “Love Diary” seems understandable. Questions on that score still linger today. To begin with, the manuscript mysteriously disappeared after it left Pierre Borel’s possession. When questioned in November 1960 by critic Armand Lanoux, who had taken up the cause of investigating d’Estoc’s existence, Borel claimed that he sold the cache of manuscripts to someone in the United States through a dealer in Lyon after World War II (Lanoux 394). In France, in the 1960s, this was apparently as good as saying that the materials were irretrievably lost to civilization.1 Borel forgot the details of the sale and Lanoux seems to have made no attempt to trace the whereabouts of the collection. Even were the manuscript of the cahier to be located and made available for inspection today, there might still be questions as to its authenticity. So the critics’ skepticism about Gisèle d’Estoc’s role as author might be justified in the case of this particular work. What is harder to understand now is why the self-styled experts of the 1930s dismissed d’Estoc’s existence altogether, why they did not recognize d’Estoc’s name from another context, and why they were unable to join up the dots, as it were, that would offer a picture of her existence. As the previous chapter about the diary affair showed, the retired cop Ernest Raynaud (1864–1936) had offered a helpful key to d’Estoc’s identity in his book En marge de la mêlée symboliste, which 54 A Storm in a Teacup Borel had cited in response to Auriant’s skepticism. In this loose collection of memoirs, Raynaud reported the rumors surrounding a (presumed) anarchist bomb attack that came to be known as the “attentat Foyot” (the attack on the Foyot), named for the restaurant where it took place. At one point, a certain “Mme M.D.” had been thought to be responsible, Raynaud reported. Critics such as Auriant were mystified as to how to connect the name of Mme M.D. with that of Gisèle d’Estoc, but the reference was really not so hard to decode, as this chapter will show. If Auriant and his contemporaries had followed the links, they would have discovered that Gisèle d’Estoc was the pseudonym of Madame Marie Paule Parent Desbarres, a person whose existence was well documented through other sources in the nineteenth century. Knowing her married name was still not quite the end of the road in the search for her existence, but it would have been an important stepping-stone to other information. Anyone who has studied the 1890s—whether in the United States, France, or any number of other European countries—knows that it was an era marked by shocking levels of political violence. The anarchists were the terrorists of their day. We have today perhaps lost sight of just how widespread the political attacks were at the turn of the nineteenth century, but historian Alex von Tunzelmann has recently reminded us of both the extent and the intensity of the violence . In the years leading up to the assassination in Sarajevo that would ignite the First World War, anarchist attacks not only took the lives of notable victims, including heads of state from around the world (“the presidents of Mexico, France and the United States, the empresses of Korea and Austria, a Persian shah and the kings of Italy, Greece and Serbia”) but struck with a frequency and intensity that would be shocking today. Portugal, for example, lost two kings to assassination on the same day in 1908 (Tunzelmann 36). The public reaction in the United States to fin-de-siècle events such as the assassination of President McKinley on September 6, 1901, or to the Haymarket riot in Chicago a little earlier, in 1886, was no less intense at the time than the reaction to the events of September 11, A Storm in a Teacup 55 2001, a century later (we always think we’ll never forget, but we always seem to manage to do so). France was...