The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (57 page)

May 6, 1871—Elizabeth Dmitrieff publishes the manifesto of the Union des Femmes, the Women's Union.

May 10, 1871—The Treaty of Frankfurt ratifi es the peace terms and cedes Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia.

May 17, 1871—A cartridge factory on the avenue Rapp explodes, killing female workers.

May 18–21, 1871—Meetings of working women on the reorganization of labor take place.

May 21–28, 1871—Semaine Sanglante (Bloody Week).

May 21, 1871—Versailles troops enter Paris, retaking the Champs-élysées.

May 22, 1871—Executions at the Parc Monceau. The Communards set fi re to a number of buildings as they retreat.

May 24, 1871—Death of Raoul Rigault on the rue Guy-Lussac and execution of the Archbishop of Paris by the Commune.

May 27, 1871—Communards are executed at Père Lachaise Cemetery; large numbers are imprisoned or deported to New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

May 28, 1871—Last battles in Belleville.

June 2, 1871—The rebuilding of Paris begins.

Abandonné—
abandoned infant; orphan

Abéqueuse
—wet nurse

Académie—
erotic photograph

Affair de coeur
—love affair

Ambulance—
hospital, or makeshift emergency center during the siege of Paris

Ami-coeur—
term for partner in an intimate relationship

Amour-propre
—self-respect

Assistance publique
—welfare

Auch
—ancient city founded by the Romans; the departmental seat of the province of Gers

Aurore
—dawn

Auscitain—
having an ancestry from Auch

Badinguet
—nickname for Napoleon III, who borrowed the clothes of a mason of this name in order to enter Paris incognito

Balthazar's Feast
—a lavish feast

Bar à vin—
wine bar

Bibard
—drunkard

Biberons
—baby bottles

Billets-doux—
love notes

Blanqui—
Auguste Blanqui, revolutionary leader, writer, and philosopher of the Left; spent much of his life in prison

Blanquiste—
partisan of the Left; supporter of the exiled leader

Bloc
—short for
bloc de foie gras

Bonne—
housemaid

Bouilli—
soup

Brigade des Moeurs
—Morals Brigade; vice squad

Caleu—
rustic oil lamp

Camélia
—kept woman

Carte—
mandatory identity card for registered prostitutes, marked with the dates of their health checks

Carte de brème
—slang for the
carte,
named after the bream, a flat white fish

Carte de visite
—photo post card

La Case de l'Oncle Tom—
the novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a bestseller in France

Charenton—
lunatic asylum

Chassepot
—army-issued rifle

Chasseur
—division of the French army, on foot or horse-mounted

Chauffe-pieds
—braziers used as foot warmers

Chouette
—slang for cute, great, nice

Chou-fleur
—cauliflower

Cocotte—
high-class prostitute cultivating a wealthy clientele

Code Napoleon—
Napoleonic Code, from which the French Civil Code was derived

Comme il faut—
accepted behavior in good society

Cora Pearl—
a notorious Second Empire courtesan, rumored to be a mistress of Napoleon III; born Emma Crouch in England

Cotte
—worker's blue canvas overall

Courte
—slang for virile member, not necessarily large

Curé—
priest, especially in rural areas

Dab
—slang for doctors who inspected prostitutes; also, for the speculum

La Dame aux Camélias—
the famous courtesan in the novel of the same name, by Alexandre Dumas
fils

D'Artagnan
—character in Dumas's
The
Three Musketeers,
based on an actual man who rose from an aristocratic Auch lineage

Demimonde
—fashionable society

Enceinte
—pregnant; also, term for the walled perimeter of Paris

En cheveux—
hatless; literally, clad only in her hair; a state denoting poverty, wantonness, bad taste, or all three

Enfant trouvé
—orphan; a term used to refer to the individual throughout life

Estaminet
—café or bar

Faiblard
—weakling; a small-membered man

Fédérés—
National Guard battalions that formed the core of the Commune fighters

La fée verte—
the green fairy, meaning absinthe

Ficelle
—thin baguette

Filles en carte—
registered prostitutes who work on the street rather than in a brothel

Flâneur
—boulevardier

Fouille merde
—sewer scavenger

Fournisseur de l'empereur
—furnisher to the emperor

Foie de canard—
preserved duck liver

Foie d'oie—
preserved goose liver

Fripier
—seller of used clothing

Frisson—
sudden feeling of excitement or fear

Frotteur—
man who harasses women in public places

Gants d'amour
—literally, gloves of love; a term for any kind of gift to a kept woman or prostitute

Garni
—cheap furnished room

Gaveuse—
goose-girl, named for the implement used to force-feed fowl, the
gavé

Gers
—province in southwest France

Grande horizontale
—upscale prostitute, courtesan

La Grande Puttana—
the great whore (Italian)

Grippe
—flu

Grisette—
young woman of bohemian tastes, often the lover of an artist or poet, and generally of the working class

Hospice des Enfants Trouvés—
hospital for abandoned infants; commonly known as Enfants Trouvés and the same as the Hospice des Enfants Assistés

Hôpital de Lourcine—
hospital where women who were not prostitutes were treated for syphilis

Hôpital Hommes Vénériens—
men's venereal hospital

Hôtel de passe—
cheap hotel for venal liaisons

“Il ne faut rien brusquer”
—“One must never act rashly,” a maxim of Napoleon III

Impasse de la Bouteille—
street name, meaning “dead end of the bottle”

Inscrit
—registered prostitute under the control of the police

Insoumise—
a woman presumed to be working unregistered; a rather broad term also alluding to defiance, insubordination

Laissez-passer—
document allowing travel into and out of Paris

La Lanterne—
left-wing newspaper

Levée en masse
—general uprising and rally to defeat the enemy

La lune
—the moon

Mairie
—city or town hall

Maison de rendezvous—
hotel for assignations, but for the better-heeled, higher-paying customers

Maison de tolérance—
tolerated house, meaning a high-class brothel

Malade
—ill

Les
Malheurs de Sophie—
popular children's book by the Comtesse de Ségur, published in 1859

Marchande d'habits
—wardrobe merchant who offered clothing on loan and for rent

“La Marseillaise”—
French national anthem

Matefaim—
kind of doughnut or fried dough

La Maternité—
maternity hospital for poor or working-class women

Miché—
john who patronizes prostitutes

Mitrailleuse
—a rapid-firing wheel-mounted cannon used by the French in the Franco-Prussian War

Mogador—
Céleste Mogador, a writer, performer, and at one time an inscribed prostitute; later Comtesse de Chabrillon

“Monsieur fils”
—literally, “Mr. Son,” meaning Louis Napoleon's son and heir

Mont de Piété
—a pawnshop system run by the city of Paris

La morte
—death

Muffe
—rich old man who patronizes prostitutes

Non-inscrit
—a clandestine, meaning unregistered, prostitute; see
insoumise

Nourrice—
wet nurse

Nouveau Plan de la Ville de Paris 1860
—street maps of Paris, by arrondissemont, bound as a small book

Paff
—shot of brandy

Paris Illustré—
popular illustrated periodical

Passe—
brothel term for the period of a prostitute's engagement with a client

Patronne
—woman manager of a shop, or similar

Père inconnu—
father unknown, the term typically used on the birth certificate filed by an unwed mother

La petite
—gesture of defiance

Petite salope
—little slut

Petroleuse
—female incendiary, mythical or real, during the siege of Paris

Pichet—
measure of wine, in a carafe

Pissoir—
public urinal

Poissonnière
—fishmonger

Poulet rôti
—roast chicken

Préservatif
—condom

Prince Leopold—
Leopold of Sigmaringen, from a branch of the dynastic Hohenzollern family; advanced as a candidate for the Spanish throne by Bismarck in 1870

Rebouiseur
—fabric worker who restores old cloth

Recherche
de la paternité—
an unwed woman's claim that a particular man is the father of her child

Red Virgin—
nickname for the leading Communard Louise Michel

Revanche—
rematch, as in a duel

Rue d'Enfer
—street name, meaning “street of hell”

Rue des Vertus
—street name, meaning “street of virtues”

Quartier
—quarter; area of the city

Quibus—
slang for derrière

Sain et sauf
—safe and sound

Saint-Lazare—
both a prison and an infirmary for prostitutes with venereal disease; opened in 1836

Saint Martin's Day—
a saint's day in November

Salope—
slut; a term of contempt

La Salpêtrière—
lunatic asylum famous for Charcot's investigations of female hysteria

Sanguettes
—local treat of the slaughtering season, made of the blood of the fowl

Sans-culotte
—working-class revolutionary of 1789

Sortie
—the launching of an attack

Sortie torrentielle—
large-scale attack launched from Paris to ward off Prussian forces

Sou—
small coin worth about half a penny

Soupe du jour—
soup of the day

Souteneur—
pimp

Suiveur
—lecher who follows women in the street

Tabatière
—rifle used by the Communards

Tolérance
—tolerated house, meaning an upscale brothel

Tour
—a guard tower

Tour d'abandon—
place for women to abandon infants anonymously, located at the Hospice des Enfants Assistés

Tricoteuse
—one of the women who sat knitting while watching the public executions at the guillotine during the French Revolution

Tripes à la mode de Caen—
a famous dish made from the four stomachs of a cow, cider, Calvados, and vegetables

Tripière
—the covered pot in which tripe is served; can be heated over a small brazier at the table

Triqueur
—rag picker

Vieille réserve—
old, specially reserved, the finest

Ville basse
—lower area of the city of Auch, linked by narrow stone stepways, the
poustrelles,
and steeply winding streets

Vin ordinaire—
table wine

Visite sanitaire—
mandatory health check for prostitutes

This novel has had a long coming-of-age, and many friends and supporters contributed to its making. The photographs and paintings, diaries, court records, letters, journals, memoirs, and artifacts consulted, and the historical commentary on them, were found over the course of my many visits to the British Library and the Cambridge University Library; the Musée Carnavelet (where an original loaf of
pain de Ferry
is available for study), the Musée de l'Assistance Publique, and the Musée de la Préfecture de Police in Paris; and the Musée des Jacobins in Auch. Many booksellers, museum curators, and casual archivists and documentarians, especially in Paris and Auch, unknowingly placed exactly what was needed on a shelf or wall or in a case.

My admiration and appreciation goes out to the historians whose work grounded this story and inspired it again and again. Most especially, I owe a great debt to Alain Corbin and Jill Harsin for their in-depth studies of nineteenth-century prostitution in France; and to Rachel Fuchs, for her insightful writing about pregnancy, poverty, motherhood, and child abandonment during the period. To better understand the era's upheavals, I relied particularly on the work of Alistair Horne, Gay L. Gullickson, John Milner, David H. Pinkney, and Rupert Christiansen. Elizabeth Anne McCauley wonderfully illuminated the history of photography in Paris. The work of many nineteenth-century writers sustained this project, especially that of Yves Guyot, who wrote vividly and courageously about (and against) the system of prostitution in his own day. Céleste Mogador has been this book's great-godmother; I first found her in passing anecdotes and scattered, but always pithy, fragments of writing. Monique Fleury Nagem's translation of Mogador's memoirs (2001) was highly appreciated and most welcome. And no acknowledgment and certainly no novel can do justice to Eugen Weber's landmark and fearsomely illuminating
Peasants into Frenchmen.