The Passion of Mademoiselle S.

The Passion of Mademoiselle S.
is a work of nonfiction. All names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright © 2016 by Adriana Hunter

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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Originally published in France as
Mademoiselle S: Lettres d'Amour, 1928–1930,
by Editions Gallimard, Paris, in 2015. Copyright © Gallimard-Versilio, 2015. This translation originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by William Heinemann, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, London.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Berthault, Jean-Yves. Title: The passion of Mademoiselle S. / edited and introduced by Jean-Yves Berthault; translated by Adriana Hunter. Other titles: Mademoiselle S. English. Description: New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2015036736 | ISBN 9780812998771 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812998788 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women—Sexual behavior—France—Paris—History—20th century—Sources. | Women—France—Paris—Correspondence. | Paramours—France—Paris—Correspondence. | Love-letters—France—Paris. | Young men—Sexual behavior—France—Paris—History—20th century—Sources. | Taboo—France—Paris—History—20th century—Sources. | Sex addiction—France—Paris—History—20th century—Sources. | Paris (France)—Social life and customs—20th century—Sources. | Paris (France)—Biography. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Letters. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical. | HISTORY / Social History. Classification: LCC HQ29 .M32613 2016 | DDC 306.70820944/361—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2015036736

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While helping a friend clear out an apartment with a forgotten cellar, I noticed a packing case behind a pile of wood. I moved aside a few old broken picture frames and the odd chair with a missing foot, and found the case was filled with empty mason jars between two thick layers of newspaper. I felt no one would go to so much trouble to protect a few unused jars without lids. I wondered: What if they'd been put there to hide some fantastical treasure?

I had the unusual feeling that an extraordinary adventure lay right there at my fingertips, that something significant was happening, like when you can feel the hand of fate or you believe you've witnessed a miracle; it was one of those goosebump moments. It could have been a treasure map or an old woolen stocking filled with hundreds of silver coins, share certificates for companies long since collapsed, the private diary of a now dead young lady, or an unknown Mozart score. So I plowed hastily through the layers of paper and jars guarding the bottom of the box, and came to a heavy leather bag, a beautiful thing with initials engraved on it in silver. And inside, so many letters, all in the same handwriting, in no particular order.

I started to read one, then another, and would eventually explore the entire correspondence of what were clearly love letters, written not merely in daring terms but with extraordinary erotic audacity. They had been deliberately kept together in this satchel, which, by all appearances, was intended to remain hidden. On one of the letters I spotted a date: 1929. And they were all signed by a woman—Simone.

Consumed with curiosity, I bought the letters from my friend. This book is a selection of these letters that Simone wrote to her married lover, Charles. Only a few of them are dated, and it took me almost a year to establish their chronology, making the most of an ambassadorship in a relatively quiet country that allowed me to devote my weekends and many an evening to the exercise. Given that the correspondence is very extensive, I have selected only a limited number of letters (a little over a third) to include in this volume, and, for reasons of discretion, names and places mentioned have been changed.

There are many possible readings of this epistolary collection….

On the surface, it could be read as one woman's salacious illicit relationship with her lover, expressed in the coarsest of terms, something to be read with the avid curiosity that an anachronistic pornographic novel might arouse. Simone's vocabulary grows more deliberately risqué with the passing months, which is surprising from a cultured young lady, particularly one who, judging by all the evidence, was from a “good family.”

What explanation can there be for such excesses and such “modern”-sounding language? And what sort of woman would have written like that in those days?

I showed these letters to a friend before their publication, and he said: “Come on, admit it, you wrote these! They cannot have been written by a woman in 1928!” I had to show him the original correspondence on its faded writing paper for him to believe me.

Where then did Simone learn the obscene vocabulary that she so openly drops into her elegant turns of phrase? I would conjecture that allowing this vocabulary to intrude into her naturally chaste words constituted a necessary transgression if she were to overcome the obstacles to her own sexual fulfillment. She most likely adopted words that Charles let slip in the heat of passion, because at the time a man would have allowed himself to say things to his mistress that he would not have said to his wife; and in her quest for liberation, Simone must have appropriated this “male” vocabulary. We can only imagine that this emancipation, which was so incongruous for the period, must have had an aphrodisiac effect on Charles. The freedom with which they spoke opened up many new possibilities for both lovers. They had overcome a powerful taboo: vocalizing their experiences.

It would seem that this verbal audacity was introduced at the same time as the acts themselves, with one form of transgression preceding and fueling the other, and so we would not find its source in the books that might have been found on Simone's shelf at the time, which I would guess contained mostly classics. Instead we should trace it to her psyche or the collective subconscious of the time. Indeed, however extensively we explore the most daring literature of the period, it seems nothing on Simone's shelves could have inspired her use of such terms. At the time these letters were written (1928–30), Jean Genet (1910–86) was embarking on his career as a petty criminal rather than a writer, and had not yet had anything published. Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) did not go to such extremes; André Gide (1869–1951) published
Corydon
in 1924 and
If I Die
in 1926, but he touched only lightly on his homosexual obsessions, and
The Songs of Bilitis
was not yet bedside reading for the upper-middle classes. In any event, none of these books resorted to language that would certainly have been deemed obscene in its day.

But Simone was reveling in this emerging world; she was a contemporary of the first silent pornographic films and of
La Revue nègre,
a musical show created in 1925 by a black woman, Josephine Baker, who scandalized the world by dancing with a banana belt as her only clothing, quickly becoming world-famous. During this period, thousands of pornographic photographs and some short films were passed around in Paris, sold under the counter at affordable prices.

This was all part of the hedonistic fame of Paris in the 1920s, a scene that was brimming with all sorts of artistic experiments that revolutionized social mores, and of a society that—perhaps in spite of itself—was witnessing the advent of an immoral “new order” in Paris. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp had pushed the boundaries of art by exhibiting a urinal, entitled
Fountain;
in 1920, the first Dada manifestations took place in Paris, followed in 1925 by the first surrealist exhibition. Meanwhile the Ballets Russes were enthralling the Parisian elite. At the time of Simone and Charles's correspondence, Paris was the global art capital, and there were no limits on creativity. Our two young lovers are therefore an expression of this, some twenty years after the separation between church and state.

One of the merits of this remarkable document is that it takes us deep into the lives of women who have at last been emancipated, and into the mind of one “flapper” as she comes to terms with who she is, and shamelessly reveals the appeal of the new freedoms offered by the Roaring Twenties. These letters are a remarkable illustration of why Parisiennes fully deserved the reputation they had earned since the turn of the twentieth century and on into the interwar years. The letters endorse the fact that physical urges are only fleeting and emotions more enduring, and they emphatically demonstrate something that we already suspect: that our contemporary world, which prides itself on having invented everything, is simply stumbling through the same endlessly repeated round of redundant human instincts and aspirations.

But what I personally find truly captivating about this correspondence, what stays with me and what I hope to offer the reader, is that it is above all else a magnificent but tragic love story shot through with an obsessive neurosis. I find it profoundly moving, and believe that, for the sake of Simone's feelings and her sacrifices (rather than for her wild excesses), this woman who suffered such pain deserves to be brought back to life, and that this aspect of her obscure and painful existence should be recognized after her death.

I have to confess I take great pleasure in publishing this volume just as my career as an ambassador comes to an end. Like Simone, I'm a nonconformist.