{"id":141976,"date":"2020-01-09T12:22:18","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T17:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141976"},"modified":"2020-01-09T14:09:18","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T19:09:18","slug":"the-horsewomen-of-the-belle-epoque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/09\/the-horsewomen-of-the-belle-epoque\/","title":{"rendered":"The Horsewomen of the Belle \u00c9poque"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Susanna Forrest’s <\/em>\u00c9cury\u00e8res<\/a> series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Blanche Allarty (source Rosine Lagier)<\/p><\/div>\n

In Berlin, the old patches of wasteland left by the bombings of World War Two are vanishing, replaced by shiny glass and granite luxury apartments. But sometimes, the remaining squares of grass and cracked concrete will throw up white tents, brightly painted caravans, and swirls of colored light bulbs, moth-eaten camels grinding hay in their teeth\u2014the unmistakable children\u2019s-book shorthand for the circus. Scarlet and yellow posters sprout on neighborhood lamp posts offering matinee performances and promising that the animals are well kept (\u201cDoesn\u2019t your dog like driving in a car?\u201d asked one poster I saw. \u201cOur dogs are no different.\u201d) At least once a Christmas season, a zebra escapes and gallops through a German town. Despite the animal-welfare restrictions and Netflix, the circus endures.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t a child who liked clowns, and, barring a large and sticky red lollipop, I barely remember being taken to the Moscow State Circus when it visited my British hometown, but for the last nine years I\u2019ve been scratching up the time and funds to immerse myself in another circus\u2014that of nineteenth-century Paris\u2014for days at a time. I\u2019m looking for fragments of lives, for women who lived at the center of public attention while simultaneously being marginal. They dealt with racism, misogyny, abuse, and great physical danger but, like the circus, they endured.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I read about the circus \u00e9cuy\u00e8res<\/em>\u00a0or \u201chorsewomen\u201d of that period in Hilda Nelson\u2019s The Ecuy\u00e8re of the Nineteenth Century in the Circus<\/em> when I was working on my first book, a cultural history of pony-mad girls called If Wishes Were Horses<\/em>. They were perhaps the first professional horsewomen in an equestrian culture storied in masculinity. They came in two forms. One, another children\u2019s-book silhouette recognizable from Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Picasso: the vaulter or acrobat who balanced on the broad barrel of a docile rosinback and leaped through flower hoops or wobbled in arabesques, as sinewy and feminine as a ballerina.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Circus: Work in the Ring,\u00a0 1899<\/p>\n

<\/p><\/div>\n

The other circus horsewoman, the haute \u00e9cole<\/em> \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em>, has largely disappeared from our consciousness, though she was the star of the nineteenth-century circus. She\u2019s a dressage or \u201cupper school\u201d rider gingering up the classical moves of the courtly riding academies of early modern Europe by jumping over dinner tables and making her horse walk on its hind legs. She, too, was drawn by Toulouse-Lautrec in his 1899 \u201cAu Cirque\u201d series\u2014the unnamed woman bent in a strange, spidery curtsey or sitting, pin-headed, in a severe riding habit on her horse.<\/p>\n

The glamour of both types of horsewoman was impeccable, their skill and bravery vertiginous. These long-dead performers became celebrities to me, fleshed out beyond the Impressionist postcards: Elvira Guerra, the first woman to compete against men at the Olympics in 1900; Caroline Loyo, \u201cthe diva of the crop\u201d whose black eyes and disciplinaire<\/em> riding brought the Jockey Club boys to the Paris circuses; and Suzanne Valadon, the acrobat of Toulouse-Lautrec\u2019s paintings who went on to be an artist herself after an injury cost her her career in the ring.<\/p>\n

The modern circus was born in England in the late 1760s when a former soldier called Philip Astley pioneered the first recognizable circuses, centering on the horse. His wife, Patty Jones, became the first woman performer, standing on the backs of three horses as they cantered around the ring. Later she took to riding with her hands covered in bees. Hilda Nelson is wise to say she cannot pinpoint the first woman to ride haute \u00e9cole dressage in a circus, but Philippine Tourniaire, whose husband had previously worked for Astley, was performing dressage in 1801.<\/p>\n

The circus rapidly transferred to Paris before the French Revolution, and local performers and showmen started rival establishments and dynasties. Paris became the capital of circus in the nineteenth century, with performers based not in tents but in grand, permanent buildings that seated up to six thousand people.<\/p>\n

Horses were the medium that gave the circus, and the Paris circus especially, its tricky, fluid quality. The horse dominated Western society\u2014from royalty to the poor, all encountered and worked with horses on a daily basis. Horses were working class\u2014the brewery drays, the delivery vanners, the nags who pulled the omnibus and tram\u2014but they were also aristocratic and bourgeois\u2014the king\u2019s favorite charger, the lady\u2019s mount, the racehorse. In the horse and at the circus, all classes met.<\/p>\n

By the early nineteenth-century, the old dressage of the military and aristocracy had been dealt a blow by changing fashions and the Revolution (Louis XVI was actually tried and sentenced to the guillotine in the old riding school of the Tuileries palace) but it was adopted and embellished by the circus and the hippodrome. The golden, spotted, or even \u201ctiger\u201d striped horses that had been treasures of the pre-Revolutionary court found a home in the Cirque Nouveau, the Cirque Fernando, and the Hippodrome at the Pont d\u2019Alma. Circus absorbed the spectacle of the great European court \u201ccarrousels\u201d of earlier centuries, turning diplomatic displays of pomp and power into entertainment for the masses. Compare a twentieth-century Barnum\u2019s circus wagon to seventeenth-century paintings of gilded, curlicued wagons at court pageants\u2014they are the same.<\/p>\n

Horses lifted the circus into its peculiar orbit, part flashy and part illegitimate, an arena where wealthy white men found themselves admiring the skills of people from other walks of life. Philip Astley was the son of a cabinetmaker, not a duke, when he recreated the Battle of Waterloo and made his horse pour tea. Pablo Fanque (aka William Darby), from my hometown of Norwich, rode haute \u00e9cole at Astley\u2019s in the 1840s as the \u201chit of the evening, never seen surpassed or even equaled.\u201d Later he was the first black circus director in Britain. And the wealthy fans were stage-door johnnies to the \u00e9cuy\u00e8res<\/em>, who performed male stunts on male horses in their half-masculine riding habits.<\/p>\n

In their off-stage lives, the \u00e9cuy\u00e8res<\/em> moved up and down the social scale. Many were from circus families, but others, like Elise Petzold or Jenny de Rahden, became performers by necessity when their fathers ruined their comfortable middle-class existences. The Bavarian Countess Ugarte spent so much money on horses that, after a divorce, she had to join the circus as an \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> for funds. Top billing was no guarantee of financial security. Once-celebrated \u00e9cuy\u00e8res<\/em> sometimes died in poverty. Antoinette Lejars was immortalized in the James Pradier statue that still sits on the facade of the Cirque d\u2019Hiver but eked out a meager living as a circus usher in her old age. Countless others who did not make the grade or were injured early in their careers must also have faded down through the ranks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jeanne Grizolles, \u00e9cuy\u00e8re haute \u00e9cole. From Le Sport Universel Illustr\u00e9<\/em>, n\u00b0 168, 1899.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This combination of sex and sexism, ambiguity and dare-devilry drew me into archives in Paris, in Berlin, and online. \u00c9cuy\u00e8res<\/em> feature in the writing of French cultural giants like Balzac, the Brothers Goncourt, Octave Mirbeau, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Georges August Sala, but I wanted to encounter them not as literary devices but as real women. At the Archives de Paris, a chunk of brutalism next to a hay meadow in the XIXi\u00e8me, I combed boxes of dusty folded pink copies of the trade paper l\u2019Interm\u00e9diaire Foraine<\/em>. In the reading room of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, I flicked through what was left of the visitors\u2019 cards of the photographer Gaspard-F\u00e9lix Nadar and his son, Paul, who shot portraits of several of the horsewomen. In Spandau, the librarian greeted me with sheaves of printed-out book titles and a trolley full of back issues of Le Cirque dans l\u2019Univers<\/em> from the Berlin circus archives.<\/p>\n

As I worked my way through the twentieth-century trade publications, they recorded the deaths first of that nineteenth-century generation, then of the early twentieth, and finally, of the historians who had written their obituaries in earlier editions. Circus history slips away under your eyes, leaving you grasping at scraps and ephemera, trying to stitch together stories about a world where the names are often false, the letters long gone, the account books evaporated. Circus research is addictive, a slot machine with no reliable prizes, that dishes out the goods at random and keeps you hankering after the next document box or microfiche.<\/p>\n

I could find a shaky diagram of the Nouveau Cirque in Paris, with the names of the horses added to their individual stalls, but I couldn\u2019t find out the identity of the enigmatic Selika Lazevski, who might have performed there. I found adverts for a horse-riding seal, a human diabolo (pictured, stuffed into a wooden reel and flying across the ring at altitude), and a clairvoyant called \u201cthe Black Princess Zama,\u201d but there was no way of knowing the real name of Sarah l\u2019Africaine, the stuntwoman who blew up the 1866-67 season with her pistols and \u201cinfernal exercises.\u201d The only person I have so far truly run to ground was the composer Gustav Meyerbeer, whose 1865 opera, L\u2019Africaine<\/em>, probably inspired the stage names of both Sarah and Selika. I found him in the Jewish cemetery behind my apartment in Berlin, ten minutes from the camel-grazing land.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Circus poster c. 1890\u20111900 (source Gallica digital library)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

But despite the patchiness of the material, the tarnish of misogyny, the missing details, and the counternarratives left out of the newspaper reports, the women\u2019s stories emerged. Some of them are too brief to work into short essays. What about \u201cAd\u00e8le,\u201d a hippodrome horsewoman turned conwoman and absinthe addict? Wild Fanny Ghyga, who ran away from her army-officer husband to join the circus but fell in the arena and was dragged till she blacked out, later dying of her injuries? What more could be uncovered about the life story of Blanche Allarty-Molier, the \u201ccentauress\u201d who managed the vaulting trick that killed a leading male acrobat\u2014the first woman to do so\u2014and married the aristocrat circus-owner who had been her teacher when she was thirteen?<\/p>\n

Tristan R\u00e9my\u2019s essays in Le Cirque dans l\u2019Univers<\/em> feature a vaulter called Ella Zaroya who stormed the German circus scene with tricks never before achieved by woman nor man before returning to their native America and marrying a woman under their original gender (male) name, Omor Kingsley. R\u00e9my also mentions an acrobat-\u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> named Willy-Lily, who never billed themself as male or female but both, and two white English women who blacked up and passed themselves off as \u201cAfrican\u201d horsemen, \u201cPublo Paddington\u201d and \u201cJohn Clifford\u201d (R\u00e9my said this worked until \u201cJohn\u201d got pregnant). Sadly he doesn\u2019t give his sources. They\u2019re a project for another time.<\/p>\n

Even if the circus has lost top billing, women are still leading equestrian performers. Think of Camilla Naprous, who went into battle on Themyscira in Wonder Woman<\/em> and who directs, coordinates and manages the horses for Game of Thrones<\/em>. In France, Camille Galle of Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Centaure trots through the Gare de l\u2019Est standing on the back of her black horse in a performance called Surgissements<\/em>. Sabrina Sow of Equinoctis performs both dressage and vaulting and styles herself as \u201cla N\u00e9gresse \u00e0 Cheval.\u201d G\u00e9raldine Knie remains the star horsewoman of her Swiss circus dynasty, and the British circus world just lost the ringmistress and \u00e9cuy\u00e8re Nell Gifford, whose memoir, Josser, detailed the grit of life on the road. Of their precursors, five substantial stories did emerge from my research. I\u2019ve already shared two here (those of Selika Lazevski<\/a> and Sarah l\u2019Africaine<\/a>). Three more will follow in the coming months: Jenny de Rahden, C\u00e9leste Mogador, and Emilie Loisset. The \u00e9clat and daring of the old \u00e9cuy\u00e8res<\/em> still lives on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Susanna Forrest<\/a>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0If Wishes Were Horses. She\u2019s currently working on a third book and a series of essays about circus horsewomen in nineteenth-century Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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