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In Defiance of her Golden Age
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was at the heart of daring interwar Paris, where she used her influence to defend those left behind by ‘progress’.
For decades the reputation of author, sculptor, linguist and poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) has been defined more by the famous people she loved than by her own groundbreaking work. Delarue-Mardrus was a figure of renown in France at the beginning of the 20th century, but as the wife of the translator Joseph-Charles Mardrus and the lover of Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer who for over 60 years hosted a literary salon in her adopted Paris, her own literary achievements and historical significance have been overshadowed. A prolific writer – she produced 70 novels in as many years of life – her work reached enormous audiences through serialisation in newspapers and she was a regular feature in the nascent celebrity magazines of the day. She combined popular appeal with critical acclaim and her work was compared with that of Émile Zola and the Nobel-nominated novelist Colette. Today she is almost forgotten, seen as a minor figure among her friends, a who’s who of early 20th-century artistic luminaries. Almost all of her work is now out of print.Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’ story runs from colonial Egypt to Flanders Fields and the decadent salons of 1920s Paris. Hers is a riches to rags story of passion, loyalty and betrayal. Delarue-Mardrus was a contradiction, a strong social conscience and transgression of sexual norms were coupled with a staunch traditionalism and political conservatism. With a hatred of the markers of modernity, her romantic idea of the past meant she valorised France’s traditional way of life. She was fascinated by Catholicism and her nostalgic depictions of the countryside of her native Normandy became the trademark of her novels. She condemned the ‘Nietzschean laugh … of the epoch’, which was diverting women from their proper role as ‘the mysterious spirit of the home’. Yet this divorcée and career woman, who had many same-sex love affairs, shocked readers with her vivid portrayals of the plight of socially marginal women. Her story provides an insight into the seismic social changes in France between the early years of the Third Republic and the Nazi occupation.Passion for womenDelarue-Mardrus’ identity as a normande and her idyllic childhood helped form her character. The youngest of six girls, daughters of a wealthy shipping lawyer, she grew up in a mansion set in lush parklands in the picturesque fishing port of Honfleur on the Normandy coast. Her passion for women began early and she would recall in her 1938 memoirs the thrill of sitting on a playmate’s mother’s lap, aged only six, saying the woman ‘was the first passion of my life’. At 21 it was the mature, aristocratic and cultured Impéria de Heredia, wife of the Académie française poet José-Maria de Heredia, who gave Lucie her first taste of lovesickness, having broken a social taboo by fleetingly addressing the much younger woman with the informal tu, but then leaving her love unrequited.Male suitors appeared – including Marshal Pétain, later leader of Vichy France – but it was the Egyptian-born French government doctor Joseph-Charles Mardrus who Lucie married in June 1900. His French translation of the Thousand and One Nights proved popular and would be mentioned in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. JC, as he was known, introduced Lucie to a life very different from the socially staid, bourgeois Catholic world she knew, a shift signalled by his insistence that she marry in a fashionable bicycling outfit, complete with masculine breeches. She became part of the Parisian circle of her husband’s friends, which included André Gide, Claude Debussy and Auguste Rodin, and spent seven years travelling throughout the Middle East with her husband, learning Arabic and studying Islam. The ultimate modern couple, they typified the bohemian exoticism of the artistic world of Belle Époque Paris.Paris at the fin de siècle was a city of boulevard life. The newly built Eiffel Tower pierced the skyline, a perpetual sign of the city’s modernity. Cinema and other popular spectacles were beginning to shape the urban experience and the popular press wove the threads of public life together. Charles believed his 26-year-old wife to be ‘one of the best poets of the French language’ and set about promoting her through his connections with the prestigious literary magazine La Revue blanche, which published her first poetry collections, Occident (1901) and Ferveur (1902). The latter included the line for which she became best known – ‘L’odeur de mon pays était dans une pomme’ (‘I held my homeland in the smell of an apple’) – a reference to the apples of Calvados. Soon she was writing short stories, essays and articles for all the major Parisian papers, including the oldest, Le Figaro, and she was a celebrity even before she published her first novel, in 1908. Her eastern adventuring with Charles and her inherent glamour made Lucie of interest to La Vie Heureuse and Femina, the original women’s photographic magazines, and earned her a place in a burgeoning celebrity culture.Lucie’s debut as a novelist, Marie, fille-mère (Marie, Unwed Mother, 1908) caused an instant sensation when it was serialised in the Paris daily Le Journal. Marie, a woman working in service, is victimised by a string of treacherous men, from her employer to a rich farmer’s son, who fathers her child but then abandons her. Readers were scandalised by the novel’s frankness and, in particular, its graphic birth scene inspired by Lucie’s research in a maternity hospital. Her naturalism was compared with that of Zola, with whom she shared a publisher. In Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2003) Rachel Mesch said that in Marie, fille-mère Delarue-Mardrus ‘construct[s] a female counter-discourse of sexuality’, yet the novel’s unquestioning endorsement of motherhood is not a liberating one; Lucie was an avowed anti-feminist.Her La Matin article ‘Du Chignon au cerveau’ (‘From the Chignon to the Brain’) urged women to embrace their innate ‘instinct which is more beautiful than intelligence’. In the feminist, Dreyfusard paper La Fronde, her fellow poet Henriette Sauret accused her of promoting a ‘stereotype of the woman whose role is to please’. The emphasis on the moral worth of motherhood continued with the semi-autobiographical Le roman de six petites filles (The Novel of the Six Little Girls, 1909), in which the mother of the eponymous children accepts her husband’s philandering, as motherly rather than romantic love is her dominant drive. It was implied that this was the case for Lucie’s mother, though it was far from the case for her.Railroad heiressWhen Lucie divorced the domineering Charles in 1913 – she called him ‘Œil’ (‘Eye’) – there had been another love in her life for a decade. Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was an American-born, French-educated heiress to a railroad fortune. The year Lucie and Charles had married, Barney had outraged her father by publishing poems to her many female lovers as Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women). When she inherited her father’s millions in 1902, Barney took up residence in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where she would stage elaborate tableaux vivants in her garden, one of which featured a naked Mata Hari. Such shenanigans offended the neighbours and led to her eviction.Natalie met Lucie one evening at the theatre and later recalled in her frankly titled 1960 autobiography Souvenirs indiscrets (Indiscreet Memories): ‘Mme Mardrus was slim and quite tall in a princess gown which moulded her perfectly symmetrical figure. One felt that in the nude such a body would occasion no disappointment.’ Lucie developed a burning passion for Natalie and was jealous of her affair with the troubled British-American poet Renée Vivien. In a stream of love poems written between late 1902 and the summer of 1903, Lucie was violent in her passion (‘Despite the night of joy and the closed doors/ I am not alone with you/ Gomorrah burns around us’, ‘I will attack you, I will cripple you! The fine short gleam of a knife’s blade!’). Barney would later publish them as Nos secrètes amours (Our Secret Loves, 1957). In fact there was very little secret about it for Natalie.Said to pick up women in the powder rooms of Paris’ new department stores and to have met her last lover on a bench on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais at the age of 80, Barney stated clearly in her Éparpillements (Scatterings) of 1910: ‘I am a lesbian … One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’In the years before the First World War her Friday afternoon literary salon became a focus for Parisian literary and lesbian society and remained so for decades. A hub for the modernist movement – Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, T.S. Elliot, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau (who once drew a caricature of Lucie) and Félix Nadar (who photographed her) were all regulars – it was also attended by everyone from patrons of the arts, such as Peggy Guggenheim, to the dancers Nijinsky, Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein. Barney became ‘a fictional model of lesbianism’, as the cultural historian Shari Benstock put it, appearing in the romans-à-clefs of her lovers: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Colette’s Claudine s’en va (Claudine Leaves, 1903), the courtesan Liane de Pougy’s Idylle sapphique (Sapphic Idyll, 1901) and Renée Vivien’s Une Femme m’apparut (A Woman Appeared To Me, 1904). Lucie would go on to portray Natalie as a vacuous seductress in her L’Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts, 1930). Indeed, Natalie found the City of Lights offered great freedom, later writing in her memoirs that ‘Paris respects and encourages personality. Thought, food and love are a matter of personal taste and one’s own business.’ Social convention meant little in these circles and, when Charles Mardrus asked Natalie to have a child for him and his wife in order to preserve Lucie’s looks, she was barely shocked; she had previously offered to marry a lesbian lover’s secret fiancé in an elaborate scheme to gain inheritance money. Such social iconoclasm was to be cut short by war.In retreatWhile the First World War disrupted Paris’ society of creatives, it did not herald a period of stasis for Lucie. She retreated to her 18th-century villa in Honfleur, the ‘Pavillion de la Reine’, with both Barney and her aristocratic lover Lily de Gramont nearby, having also sought refuge from Paris’ shortages and blackouts. Lucie published three novels and a collection of poetry during the war years, despite also serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver and a nursing auxiliary at Honfleur’s military hospital. Yet her output in this period reflected little of the liberalism of her social milieu, instead depicting the war as revealing the rottenness of modernity and the importance of traditional values. Her short story La Marraine (The Godmother, 1918) engaged with the accusations of impropriety surrounding the marraines de guerre programme, which encouraged young women to become penfriends with soldiers at the front. The protagonist Géo divorces her husband to pursue a career as a painter and becomes a ‘marraine’, only to discover that her correspondent is her ex-husband. She sees the error of her ways after reading his ‘teachings’ about the proper place of women. He writes: ‘Women who have no children often become their own dolls’ (a reference to Géo’s dyed hair), concluding ‘let them not cut their hair short!’, causing Géo to leap up in horror that she has done just that. This view of the emancipation of women was typical of the French experience of the war, which was very different to that of the British and Americans; while some British women gained the vote in 1918, French women had to wait until after another world war for this right.The 1920s saw the dawning of a new era for women, but Lucie was not of the generation that most benefitted from it. While often presented as a characteristic personality of the années folles – the ‘crazy years’ between the end of the First World War and the 1929 economic crash – Lucie was in her mid-forties at the advent of the new decade and was not one of the period’s bright young things. There are evocative 1920s’ details in her work – motor cars, flapper fashion, short haircuts and a more casual, colloquial language, all symbols of the social liberation of women – but, as the linguistic theorist Anna Livia has written:Delarue-Mardrus’s writing is more characteristic of the Belle Époque, which represented the tastes and passions of her youth. The difference between the two periods may be summed up in the contrast between the juxtaposition of the elegant and the extraordinary typical of art nouveau, and the insistent geometrics of art deco.She embraced a flamboyant femininity – elaborate gowns and Lalique jewellery – and rejected the masculine fashions adopted by many members of the lesbian haut monde, captured by the love of Barney’s life, the US painter Romaine Brooks. Her 1924 portrait of Radclyffe Hall’s partner, Una, Lady Troubridge, in starched shirt, monocle and with sharply bobbed hair, typified the look of this younger generation of what has been termed ‘Paris Lesbos’. But, even if she did not precisely fit with the fashions of the time, Lucie still had her greatest successes in the 1920s.Norman superstitionsDelarue-Mardrus’ standout works of the 1920s continued the pastoral themes of earlier efforts such as L’Ex-voto (The Ex Voto, 1922) and Graine au vent (Seed in the Wind, 1925), featuring the customs, dialects and folk superstitions of the Normandy peasantry. Hers was an almost fetishistic attitude towards the pastoral and the ‘earthy’ – one that could appear paternalistic – and she was obsessed with the infinitesimal distinction between the upper and lower bourgeoisie. This is obscure today but spoke to her contemporary readership. In 1923 she was popular enough to have a commercial biography published about her under the series title ‘Les célébrités d’aujourd’hui’ (‘The celebrities of today’). The biography made great play of her connections with the ‘Orient’, the frontispiece showing her wearing her trademark headband and a leopardskin coat. It remarked on the fact that four of her stories had been made into films in these earliest days of cinema and called her ‘one of the most illustrious poetesses of our time’, saying: ‘This woman is a muse, a fairy, a genius, she has all the gifts, she has them to a superlative degree. Her life is an enchantment.’In the decade between 1919 and 1930, Lucie published 13 novels, a book of children’s poetry, two biographies and a beauty book. Embellissez-vous (Beautify Yourself, 1926) was a surprising addition to her body of work, but the subjects of her biographies were an even more astonishing combination: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun from Normandy who died in 1897 and was canonised in 1925, and Oscar Wilde. In her memoirs, Lucie said Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, her ‘passionate tribute of an unbeliever’ to a ‘girl of my own Calvados’, was written in a period of ‘feverish work during which I felt driven by a mysterious force’. She was highly critical of the modernity of the saint’s cult, writing of the ‘heresy of electricity’ on finding candles banned in the chapel of the Carmelite convent of Lisieux and expressing horror that at her canonisation: ‘The relics were carried in a car! I have never liked motor cars.’ The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar would later condemn the book as ‘a bilious commentary’, Thérèse’s convent threatened to sue and a Catholic newspaper, La Croix, called the book the ‘enterprise of a novelist known for her dirty novels’ and ‘a slap to the lovable face of a saint’. In her response to the editor, Delarue-Mardrus argued that she had attempted to rehabilitate the saint: ‘In the artistic and literary world that I frequent … the “Little Thérèse” is completely unknown … I have discovered finally that my radiant fellow Norman was not the pink bon bon that we have been led to believe, but a tough and tragic soul.’ She later made a statue of Saint Thérèse, which she gave to Notre Dame du Havre church.Les Amours d’Oscar Wilde (The Loves of Oscar Wilde, 1929) was inspired by Delarue-Mardrus’ several connections to the writer. Natalie Barney had heard The Happy Prince at its author’s knee when she met Wilde in a New York hotel as a child. Later, she would have a relationship with Olive Custance, who married Lord Alfred Douglas, known to the world as Oscar Wilde’s lover ‘Bosie’, a personal friend of Lucie’s. Natalie was briefly engaged to Bosie in 1902 and later had a 14-year affair with Wilde’s niece, Dolly. Such incestuousness was common in Lucie’s social world; there are endless stories of passionate love affairs, dissolute behaviour and ignominious deaths (Dolly Wilde died during the Blitz, in the grip of alcoholism and hard drug addiction). Yet, despite the dramatic personalities, when Barney’s faithful maid-cum-personal assistant Berthe Cleyrergue was interviewed in the 1970s, she marked Lucie out for special mention, saying ‘She was astonishing!’The end of the 1920s saw Lucie at work on her most notorious novel. The protagonist of L’Ange et les Pervers is a ‘hermaphrodite’, Marion, who lives a double life as a lesbian in Lucie’s own Parisian social circle and as a gay man in the city’s parallel homosexual demi-monde. Although the novel was an intriguing exploration of gender identity, it was ambiguous in its politics. At a time when the idea of ‘sexual inversion’, as sexologists termed homosexuality, was still in its relative infancy – Freud published work on the topic in the early 1920s – the novel explores ideas about the making or performing of gender identity that would not be fully explored for 60 years. The gay and lesbian characters in the book are also portrayed as dignified: ‘Beauty and money are never discussed in the same sentence. For dirty perverts, they are decidedly clean-minded.’ Yet the novel was not necessarily radical, being part of a fashionable genre of literature that depicted lesbians as members of a third sex. Both Vivien and Barney featured gender-neutral characters in their works.The lesbian literature of the day varied greatly in its explicitness. Although the subject of an obscenity trial, The Well of Loneliness was mild compared with the US writer Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack (1928), which parodied Barney’s lesbian circle in barely coded sexual terms. Lucie may have appeared as Sappho in her own play of 1907, Sapho désespérée (Sappho in Desperation), but, as Anna Livia has shown, in L’Ange et les Pervers ‘Delarue-Mardrus is at pains to make clear, in her charmingly guarded, neo-Victorian way, that for Marion anatomy is destiny, condemning him/ her to a life outside of human sexuality, rather than facilitating the enjoyment of both male and female love objects’. Her position on Wilde’s homosexuality in her biography of the previous year had outlined a similar medical model of sexuality, saying that, like the Norman belief that a pregnant woman chased by a bull would give birth to a child with a calf’s head, Wilde’s mother believed she was carrying a girl. Lucie was no revolutionary, yet the horrors of war would see her politics become radicalised.Reason for livingIn 1932, approaching 60, Lucie met the opera singer Germaine de Castro, who would come to dominate her life. Her friend Myriam Harry, another woman of letters, later said that Germaine was Lucie’s ‘only passion, her only reason for living’. Although Lucie published 14 novels in this decade and three further biographical works – dealing with William the Conqueror, the actor and famed Catholic convert Eve Lavallière and a second study of Saint Thérèse – friends felt that her efforts to help Germaine relaunch her career, including lending her name to her music hall act, were distracting her from her own work. In truth the unfashionably large, Jewish and lower-class de Castro was unpopular among Lucie’s chic, upper-class, often antisemitic, friends. When Lucie’s family forced her to choose between them and Germaine, she chose Germaine. In 1938 Gallimard published Lucie’s Mes mémoires (My Memoirs) as part of a series that also featured the autobiographical works of Isadora Duncan, Amelia Earhart and Gertrude Stein. A volume had already appeared, titled Femmes d’aujourd’hui. Colette. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1936), a parallel biography of the two novelists, which perpetuated Lucie’s image as an otherworldly bohemian, whose fame was as strong as ever. That changed as the war began.While Lucie could have moved to the security of Vichy France, where the warmer climate would have benefitted her crippling rheumatism, she stayed instead with de Castro in their house in Château-Gontier, Normandy. When anti-Jewish persecution intensified and de Castro was issued with a yellow star, she fled and Lucie was left to answer the Gestapo’s questions alone. Her 1938 novel Fleurette was banned, her works were removed from the school curriculum (they had been commonly used in school readers) and she found it difficult to get new work published.While Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, living in increasingly straitened circumstances in Florence, developed Fascist sympathies (Romaine had once lived with the war hero and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who christened Mussolini ‘Il Duce’), Lucie’s politics took on aspects of radical feminism. She wrote:I return to my favourite idea: castrating all men at birth. Keeping only a few in each region, carefully trained with the sole function of reproduction. The castrati would be sufficient to ensure the work necessary to human life and the women would deal with everything else.In increasingly ill health, she died in the war’s closing months.Personal courageIt is little surprise that Delarue-Mardrus’ work has been forgotten: her concern with a social stratification that no longer exists and her strangely conflicting views of gender and sexuality were of their time. When a writer’s work falls out of fashion they can be forgotten in the canons of literature, but equally the historical personality and their relevance for their period can be overlooked. Much of Lucie’s work does in fact still speak to modern audiences – her extraordinary poem ‘Refus’ (‘Refusal’), about childlessness and the experience of menstruation, attests to that – but she should also be restored to her place in the thick of France’s most turbulent decades. The courage with which she lived her personal life was inspiring. She was a non-conformist who pursued creative and personal fulfilment in defiance of the norms of her age. Although her rejection of modernity could appear narrow-minded, she was voicing an unease felt widely at the time and championing those left behind as progress marched on. As the scholar of French literature Pauline Newman-Gordon put it: ‘She was sensitive to the plight of the orphan, the poor, and the homeless, and to the anxieties of the modern mind, torn between the aristocratic and the plebeian, the province and the city, the old and the new.’Sophia L. Deboick is a historian of religion and popular culture and a freelance writer.
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