The Queen of Cups—A Novel (review)

Queen of Cups is the nurturer, filled with compassion. . . . She is full of creativity and artistry. She's also sexual and secretive. You'll pay a price if you cross her.²

I never in my life could be happy without her, & with her I must starve.³

Juliette Peirce is still a mystery. Little is known about her and there is a strong suspicion that we don't even know her real name. Still, we can see glimpses of the life she must have led through diaries, correspondence, and the testimonies of neighbors who were interviewed sometimes many decades later. Despite her desire for secrecy, Juliette apparently loved to talk about her European past. But the surviving record is spotty and inconsistent, and people's memories unreliable. Juliette has been said to be a relative of Franz-Josef, ruler of the Austrian-Hungarian double monarchy, and to have bounced on his knee; she has been said to be a cousin of Bismarck, and to have sat on his arm; and she apparently also sat in Queen Victoria's lap. It's unlikely that's all true. Still there are common threads: that she lived for much of her young life in Nancy, that she had an Alsatian accent, that her father was of noble blood, that she had two sisters and two brothers (one of whom committed suicide while the other was a diplomat known to George Bancroft), and that she owned expensive clothes and jewelry. Why did she leave Europe and why was she so secretive about her past? There are several accounts given by Peirce and Juliette. On one account, she left France, pretending to elope with a fictitious man while renouncing her family and her inheritance so that her brother's gambling debts could be paid off. The secrecy was necessary to protect the family's honor.⁴ On another account, Juliette made one of the highest princes of Europe, a man of particularly bad character, her enemy after she exposed the scheming way in which he sought to trap a charming young girl into marrying him. In this account, the secrecy was necessary to protect Juliette.⁵ Samuels's account is simpler and more pedestrian, and it would not surprise me if that part of her story were closer to the truth, even though she is miles off with the rest. Her Juliette is raped by a powerful family friend, gets pregnant, is accused of having seduced the man, and shipped off to a discrete countryside clinic to carry the pregnancy to term. It doesn't come to that. The baby dies in the ninth month and must be surgically removed. What is left is a socially and physically damaged young woman. In this way Samuels combines in one fell swoop Juliette's departure from Europe, the abrupt break with her past, the secrecy, and Juliette's life-long gynecological problems.

In part Samuels's aim with The Queen of Cups is to get a better understanding of Juliette by writing a fictionalized account of her life.⁶ This is a laudable goal that should appeal also to Peirce scholars who seek to better understand Peirce. Quite a bit of research has been done on Juliette's identity, but in all of it Juliette herself is markedly absent. Victor Lenzen's "The Identity of Juliette" is a carefully crafted abductive tale, but one soon gets lost in the thicket of the genealogical underbrush of nineteenth-century European nobility.⁷ The same is true for the well over two dozen pages prosaically titled "Data Concerning the Second Wife of Charles Sanders Peirce," carefully collected by Max H. Fisch. In 1959 Harvard had appointed Fisch as Peirce's official biographer, but Fisch found that he could not write Peirce's biography without knowing who Juliette was.⁸ It seems, however, that searching for Juliette's identity is a quite different enterprise than getting to know who she was. Samuels's fictional account is an attempt to...