L.C.
Susan Daitch
1987
INTRODUCTION
Provided all relations, friends and so on are long dead, even the most
precise portrait of a citizen is, without a corresponding name, difficult
to
identify. A portrait in print is no different. Certain fundamental facts
about
the life of Lucienne Crozier will always be a mystery, but if we can believe
what diarists write about themselves to be true, then we have access to
the
private thoughts of a woman who witnessed a revolution and vanished
several years later, an indirect casualty of its aftermath.
What is unusual about the life described in her journal is the degree of
latitude available to Lucienne Crozier in mid-nineteenth-century Europe.
Whether this degree of latitude was freely available to her is questionable,
but free or not, she took it. She may have shocked some of her
contemporaries, but it's not clear if she suffered for it. Henry James's
Mrs
Walker told Daisy Miller she was old enough to be reasonable and old
enough to be talked about, but what the Mrs Walkers of Paris in the late
1840s thought of Lucienne Crozier she barely tells us, and for all
appearances doesn't really care. Readers should remember it was a time of
revolution, and the hierarchical structures of social order were shifting,
grinding against one another, flipping over. It was as if the physical laws
of
gravity, in select circumstances, weren't being followed according to the
customary fashion. It is just this February 1848 Revolution which is central
to the diary.
Take any point in history and you find contradictions, or a profound
turning-about-face of a segment of the population. 1848, which saw the
publication of both Wuthering Heights and the Communist Manifesto,
was a time when many who had felt passionately about revolution quickly
turned their backs on it. Frustration and disillusionment aside, when faced
with torn up streets, crossed by great walls of chairs, tables, paving stones,
carriages and people's minor possessions thrown out of windows; when faced
with random open firing by both sides, there is an impulse to stay indoors.
If Lucienne Crozier initially led a sheltered life, her ideas were shaped
by the same sources as those of many other women of her class and
education: romantic novels, popular newspaper serials, feuilletons
written
by Eugene Sue and Alexander Dumas père. Marxism and fluff
may seem
like strange bedfellows but from stories of proletarian adventure Lucienne
drew conclusions antipathetic to romance. Everyday events aren't simply
the
easily forgotten commonplace but have a slot in a societal index, a chain
of
causes and effects. Beggar girls don't become heiresses overnight. Workers
don t own the means of production. They will never become millionaires.
The
stories which illuminated the lives of Paris's working class had, when it
came
to happy endings, little basis in truth.
Lucienne had heard of the utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier.
At meetings of the revolutionary cell, 14 Juillet, she became familiar
with
theories of how capitalism functions and survives. She read Pierre Joseph
Proudhon, some Marx, perhaps Bakunin, learned of Franc,ois Babeuf, who
founded secret societies during the French Revolution, Louis August Blanqui,
one of history's first professional revolutionaries whose Central Republican
Society was active during the February Days. The notebook's last owner,
had
he read her diary, might have said Lucienne Crozier's political beliefs
were
more emotional than theoretical, but I think she had enough information
to
argue convincingly, and her convictions are admirable.
The bourgeois regime of Louis-Philippe, dull, oppressively pedestrian
in its values, was particularly repressive in its attitude towards women.
Women's work was poorly paid and, in consequence, many were forced into
prostitution. Education beyond the secondary school level was forbidden.
Marriages were often arranged by families for economic reasons. The
respective man and woman might have met only once or twice before the
wedding, and divorce was nearly impossible. Women were considered part
of their husbands' accumulated property; they were denied citizenship, had
the same legal rights as lunatics and the mentally deficient.
On 12 April 1849, Daumier published a cartoon in Le Charivari
which depicted three women placing their hands on a top hat. Is the laying
on of hands part of a witches spell? Are they going to toss the contaminated
hat over their shoulders? The caption reads, 'The insurrection against
husbands is proclaimed the most sacred of duties.' The women are ugly.
Nineteenth-century cartoons, as a rule, represented suffragettes, socialist
women and blue stockings as harpies and harridans. The satiric attitude
towards these groups wasn't an original product of Daumier's comic vision;
his series on women's movements reflected the popular sentiment of his
time. Much of the French press and theatre portrayed feminists in exactly
the same absurd light. These are women who divorce themselves from
domesticity and conventional sexuality, threatening to skew society's
established lines of gender straight to hell. This aberrant gang has the
power
to run masculine/feminine classifications upside down and inside out. Many
radicals, such as Proudhon, were outspoken anti-feminists. The movement
was seen as something ominous, outside any political sphere, a threat to
the
social order of the family if you were an anarchist, to the family and the
state if you weren't. Unlike Proudhon and his scientific socialists, the
utopians such as Comte de Saint-Simon, ironically of aristocratic lineage,
were much more supportive of women's rights. (In Fourier s case, this
support was manifested in spiritual form. His followers sought the female
messiah in the East.) There were exceptions among the socialist and right-
wing factions, but generally women's rights was a question all sides agreed
on negatively. Daumier was reinforced by Babeuf, Balzac, Napoleon,
Talleyrand, Gavarni, Guizot and King Louis-Philippe. Women, as Delacroix
himself painted them, were involved in the fighting of each revolution from
1789 to the Commune and after, but, unfortunately, the patriarchal system
and its biases were as pervasive on the left as on the right. In spite of
isolated support, 1848 marked a moment of activity before women's groups
were banned in August of that year. Opened and closed within a few months
were the Club de l'Emancipation founded by Jeanne Derouin, Club des
Femmes, founded by Eugènie Niboyet, and Tristan, named for Flora
Tristan,
a feminist labour organizer who died in 1844. There were also many
journals, such as La Politique des Femmes and La Voix des Femmes. So by
1849 Daumier was beating a horse which was already quite assaulted, but
not dead.
As a footnote to this discussion on women I would like to add that we
have no idea what Lucienne Crozier looked like. Delacroix's portrait of
her,
even if it were to be absolutely verified, is a vague pencil sketch whose
quick, general features resemble those of many European or even American
faces. Nowhere in her diary does she describe herself. For every reader
there
will be a different mental picture of Lucienne Crozier. It is unusual in
a text
written by and often about women that there are so few physical
descriptions. The subject of women's appearance is nearly entirely ignored.
This absence almost precludes our thinking of these women in sexual terms
at all. For such a personal work never meant to be read by anyone other
than the writer, she felt it necessary to describe only what struck her
as
unusual, rather than that with which she was familiar. The decisions behind
conscious omissions on the part of the author are a continuous yet invisible
chapter.
(In a year of revolution, the sight of women in trousers aroused a kind
of social provocation which had nothing to do with suspicion of androgyny
or
disgust with the idea of fashion. )
It is a testament to the nature of books, even handwritten ones, that
Lucienne's diary survived at all, travelling as it did through Paris during
a
revolution, across France, across the Mediterranean, landing in North Africa,
then tracing its steps alone back to Paris. Diaries (especially translated
ones)
should be read with an element of mistrust. Diarists are under no obligation
to write the truth about themselves. Sometimes it isn't even a matter of
playing with truths and actualities. As Virginia Woolf noted in her diary,
one
tends to write more often when one is in certain frames of mind than others.
The final picture, in spite of the best intentions, in spite of private
oaths of
objectivity, tends to be distorted. The balance shifts and the reader is
left
with an exaggerated profile of depression and dissatisfaction. A diary,
however, comments on a life in a way consciously edited memoirs and
biographies can't. When one writes for oneself, one is allowed to be
unselfconscious, invulnerable to threats of being tripped up by the outside
world. Allowed or not, there is such a thing as tripping over what one
perceives as one's mistakes, and keepers of diaries are susceptible to
retrospective embarrassments. Solitude eggs the diarist on. At various points
in the text, Lucienne looks back, notes that all the time she was thinking
X, Y
was really going on. The reader, having time on her side, knows these shifts
weren't so explicit but underfoot all along. The very nature of remembering
and recording establishes a counterpoint pattern. When Lucienne's
memories, observations and expectations were jumbled, confounding any
logical narrative sequence, I have made every attempt to regularize passages
within a given dated entry. No surrealist booby traps here.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to reproduce the physical quality of the
original journal: the newspaper clippings glued in at intervals, pasted
letters,
changes in handwriting when she was writing under pressure, drawings in
the margins. A diary of many uses, occasionally Lucienne wrote letters out
in
her diary first, later copying over this first draft and sending the revised
version.
The inclusion of letters in the diary provided a clue which led to the
only supporting evidence for the existence of a Lucienne Crozier outside
the
proof represented by her diary itself. Her friend Fabienne Ruban, who
became Madame Ruban-Xavier, died in 1896, leaving her estate to her two
children whose heirs (Fabienne's grandchildren) were very generous in
allowing me to examine the family archives. The letters to Fabienne first
copied in Lucienne's diary were also found in Madame Ruban-Xavier's
papers. Identifying documents kept by the Xavier estate was an interesting
task. There was a box of partially burned letters which Fabienne's son,
when
old and senile, had attempted to destroy - stopped, according to family
legend, by a niece. These letters revealed a number of incidents. Late in
1859, the Croziers learned of Delacroix's portrait of Lucienne in Madame
Ruban-Xavier's possession; they tried to force Fabienne to return it to
them.
Since Lucienne and Charles Crozier had never been legally divorced, under
French law all her possessions should have passed to him. Lucienne, in fact,
never possessed the portrait. Delacroix gave it to Fabienne, as her last
letter
will prove. I've included only one of Fabienne's letters at the end of the
book
to attest to some of the circumstances surrounding Lucienne's death.
It is ironic, given Lucienne's relationship to her husband, that the
name Crozier is the only name history has left her. When she and her
husband finally separated, the Crozier family of Roubaix had her name
struck from family and church records. A deeply Catholic family from an
insular part of France, the thought of husbands and wives living separate
lives was profoundly threatening, neither discussed nor tolerated. When
her
name does appear there is no maiden name, so her place and date of birth
remain unknown. The 1792 law which allowed divorce was rescinded in
1826. The Code Napoléon which followed reduced the rights and general
state of women considerably, and one has only to examine the life of George
Sand to determine the difficulties facing a woman who found living with
the
man she married an impossibility and the process of obtaining a legal
separation almost as tortuous. Charles's family responded to Lucienne's
unfaithfulness with vehemence although they were late in surmising the
extent of her infidelities and supported her almost up until the moment
of
her departure. The thoroughness of their erasures notwithstanding, many
records in the Nord and other parts of France were destroyed in the course
of two world wars. Research in France turned up scanty evidence, thin hopes
for any references to Madame Lucienne Crozier outside of the
aforementioned sources, and many dead ends. Of others mentioned in the
diary, corroborating evidence was found in more obscure locations. One
source was police reports such as were kept for political prisoners and
criminals at large. Jean de la Tour, for example, was wanted by the police
for
involvement with Quarante-Huitards who, the authorities believed,
had
planned the February insurrection and the murder of Maxime Aubuisson
(also known as M. Arbuite, Robert Arbust, and César Robert). According
to
the report, Jean de la Tour was clever at eluding the police in Paris. His
quick-witted alertness, well known to the Prefecture, was a side of his
character much less apparent to Lucienne, of whom there are no police
records. According to his file, the garde municipale believed reports
which
indicated that when he departed from France he fled alone to Italy.
Lucienne's diary contradicts this information so secret and so valuable
to the
Préfecture at that hour.
Eugène Delacroix doesn't mention young Madame Crozier in his
journals or in Le Corréspondance. The journal of 1847 was lost during
that
year, but were it to be found, the absence of her name wouldn't be unusual.
By his fifties he rarely described his lovers in his papers with the exception
of his cousin, Josephine de Forget. Any letters Lucienne wrote to him either
were not kept at the time or were lost after the painter's death. The
Portrait of a Woman in Moroccan Costume, believed to be Lucienne Crozier,
is housed in a private collection. Its companion, the portrait she drew
of him,
was never seen after the February Revolution. Lack of substantiation may
give critics cause to wonder if Madame Crozier was, in fact, ever involved
with Eugène Delacroix; was their affair a daydream made real in notebook
pages, a way of dramatizing her own life? Others may point to the slightly
disjointed narration, shifts in tone indicating the writer's mental instability,
but I think all of this is beside the point. Whether her affair with Delacroix
actually occurred or not, it indirectly served to fuel her social consciousness.
At the time Lucienne wrote, Delacroix's opinions and his art were extremely
apolitical. Her arguments with him were a necessary step towards her
radicalization. She beat her head against the wall of 'how a painting means',
like many literal-minded twentieth century viewers of abstract art; she
just
couldn't get it. The routes between life's events and their representation
through painting were, to her, murky and unreliable. The Delacroix debates
map her rejection of romanticism and her inclination to embrace the kind
of
realism practised by some of his critics of a younger generation. Practitioners
of realism from Courbet to Dickens and Balzac (both admired by Marx) used
art and literature for purposes of social criticism. The information Lucienne
gathered even from the sloppy realism of Remy Gommereux made the
ideological step to socialism an easy one.
Translating a work never intended for publication, written by an
unknown woman, the translator is compelled to make decisions which,
naturally, never entered the writer's mind. The voice of the translator,
therefore, is destined to appear in the literal and metaphorical margins
of
the text.
The original French-language diary had a faintly bitter smell, the
mustiness of old paper turned sour mixed with attar, evidence of the scented
drawer. The book was hidden from the family for decades, left to solipsistic
fermentation, the vinegar battling the sugary, until I blew the dust from
the
journal's cover. Since I live alone but haven't always, I can imagine
Lucienne's need for secrecy. The back of the drawer acted like a precipice
which separates hostile tribes. The simple box was a piece of geography
which kept the need to record her thoughts from the eyes of servants and
husband. It might be a friend or visitor whom she knew went through the
papers on her desk when her back was turned. There is always that other
person in the house.
Before World War II, at a time when some of the original pages from
Delacroix's journals were turning up in Paris book shops, it might have
been
possible to find a book like this one: worn brown leather covers, streaks
of
gold still clinging around the edges, initials engraved in the centre. In
the
case of this document, the letters read: L.C. As one turns its pages, a
breeze
threatens to blow the whole thing apart, but it is treated carefully, wrapped
in paper, secured with twine, carried off and forgotten about for a few
more
years.
would like to acknowledge the help of Monsieur and Madame Odilon
Xavier, without whose generous assistance this translation would not have
been possible; also Mademoiselle Eugènie Redon of the Bibliothèque
Nationale, and Monsieur G. A. Braque of the Préfecture of Police
in Paris.
Finally, I wish to thank my good friend Luc Ferrier who gave me no time
to
change my mind.
Dr Willa Rehnfield
New York City
May 1968