{"id":151338,"date":"2021-03-10T14:54:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T19:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=151338"},"modified":"2021-09-29T14:04:28","modified_gmt":"2021-09-29T18:04:28","slug":"the-princess-daredevil-of-the-belle-epoque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/10\/the-princess-daredevil-of-the-belle-epoque\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cPrincess Daredevil\u201d of the Belle \u00c9poque"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Susanna Forrest\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>\u00c9cuy\u00e8res<\/em><\/a>\u00a0series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00c9milie as a \u201cbeauty of the circus\u201d holds the center as Hippodrome girls and lesser \u00e9cuy\u00e8res make up the frame. Illustration appears in the January 5, 1878, issue of La Vie parisienne<\/em>. Courtesy of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the circus poster, nothing but these words:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cToday: Debut of Mademoiselle \u00c9milie LOISSET\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Nothing else, no other program. Why would you add more? It suffices for the habitu\u00e9s of the Franconi circus. It\u2019s a talisman, this feminine name \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00c9milie Loisset! \u00c9MILIE LOISSET! \u00c9MILIE LOISSET!!!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cScapin,\u201d a.k.a. Alexandre Hepp, in Le Voltaire<\/em>, May 15, 1881.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I used to know three things about the circus horsewoman \u00c9milie Loisset: she was beautiful, she was good, and, like many of the most cherished young women of a morbid, misogynist nineteenth century, she died tragically and gruesomely when she was only in her twenties. While these bare facts are true, they do not evoke a person so much as an archetype\u2014the virtuous beauty who meets her fate with her melancholy face untouched. The way in which men wrote about her before and after her death reminds me of what Elisabeth Bronfen called \u201cculture [using] art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.\u201d In fiction and in reminiscences and journalism and even riding manuals, her death is reenacted over and over as melodrama, cautionary tale, and plot twist.<\/p>\n

I was hoping that by collecting and overlaying these texts, I\u2019d find the real woman amid them. What I found instead was an international game of telephone mined with conflicting accounts, confused identities (of both people and horses), facts carried over into fiction and fiction into \u201cfacts,\u201d lavish, unverifiable hearsay, and, somehow, a glimpse of an individual who both was and was not what the men wanted her to be. I searched French, Belgian, Austrian, and German newspapers of the period, contacted aristocratic European families, triangulated points on maps and dates in sporting pages, signed up to genealogy communities, queried museums and archives, and finally found myself zooming in on the handwritten record of her death\u2014and, as it turned out, her true name. I\u2019ve reached the limits of what I can research during the pandemic, but this is what I know so far.<\/p>\n

She was born Marie Laurence \u00c9milie Roux in Paris in 1856. Her father, Jean-Joseph Roux, was a popular ice-cream maker, and her mother was Antoinette Fortun\u00e9e Loisset, an illegitimate daughter of the circus proprietor Jean Baptiste Antoine Loisset and Virginie H\u00e9l\u00e8ne de Linski\u2014his later wife and codirector, who had been just sixteen when she had Antoinette. Virginie went on to have many more children with Jean Baptiste, although between the Loissets\u2019 constant traveling and their circus habit of reshuffling family and stage names, it\u2019s hard to straighten out their doubled family tree (not to mention the fact that one child can be S\u00e9raphin Fran\u00e7ois in Belgium and Franz Seraph in Germany and eventually be known simply as Fran\u00e7ois). Most of the children performed in their father\u2019s circus, with varying degrees of endurance and success: equestrianism was their specialty, whether rosinback acrobatics or high school dressage. <\/p>\n

Antoinette\u2019s illegitimacy and her circus background made her a strange choice of wife for Roux, an established businessman. But by 1855, Roux\u2019s Paris shop had run into financial trouble and bankruptcy, and he was subsequently found guilty of unfair trading, fined, and even imprisoned briefly. \u00c9milie was born in the middle of his legal travails the next year, and her younger sister, Hortense Charlotte Camille\u2014whose stage name was Clotilde Loisset\u2014arrived in 1857.<\/p>\n

This reversal of fortunes perhaps accounts for the family\u2019s retreat into the safety of the circus. Both girls became equestrian performers when they were children, trained, it\u2019s said, by their uncle (S\u00e9raphin) Fran\u00e7ois Loisset\u2014now a circus proprietor himself\u2014and his wife, the famous and formidable horsewoman Caroline Loyo. Roux worked for Fran\u00e7ois\u2019s circus, too, managing the books. Though they toured across the continent they were not the fly-by-night tented circus we\u2019re used to, instead performing for months at a time in Europe\u2019s brick-and-mortar urban circuses and hippodromes.<\/p>\n

The earliest record I\u2019ve found of \u00c9milie performing is from 1868, when she appeared at the Cirque Loisset in Belgium aged twelve with Clotilde, demonstrating \u201call the aplomb and all the valor of their older colleagues.\u201d The sisters were \u201cas gracious ballerinas as they are horsewomen.\u201d They were both praised for their dressage and their work dancing or leaping on a cantering horse, its back often equipped with a small fringed stage or \u201cpanneau.\u201d<\/p>\n

The journalist Hugues Le Roux saw \u00c9milie as an eighteen-year-old, playing Prince Charming opposite her sister, and was struck by what he later described as \u201cthe first revelation of the beauty of a woman on horseback, of the artistic union of the two most perfect curvilineal forms in creation: the horse adding height to the woman by the majesty of its stature, the woman daringly poised on the animal like a wing.\u201d Writing after her death, he remembered her as having \u201ca taste for sadness,\u201d although that doesn\u2019t really match accounts by men who were closer to her and is perhaps more of a fancy of his. However, this ghoulish male assessment was something \u00c9milie seemed to inspire even before her death cast everything into macabre hindsight.<\/p>\n

In 1878, Clotilde and \u00c9milie were performing a vaulting pas de deux at the Cirque des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es in Paris when Clotilde\u2019s horse shied to one side and struck \u00c9milie\u2019s. \u00c9milie fell face first into the arena and was knocked out. Clotilde promptly fainted and fell off her own horse. The novelist Jules Barbey d\u2019Aurevilly was in the audience, and later reminisced about \u00c9milie having \u201cthe beauty of death\u2014this beauty that is often far greater than the beauty of the living\u201d as she lay unconscious in the sawdust for ten minutes. The sight of the two \u201cpoetic girls\u201d being carried out of the ring \u201cas though on a shield, on the shoulders of clowns\u201d was, for him, \u201ca painful but superb spectacle.\u201d Like the troupers they were, \u00c9milie and Clotilde reappeared within minutes to assure the audience that they were well.<\/p>\n

Despite the fall, the Loisset sisters were on the rise. They had broken through to working for two of Europe\u2019s greatest circus proprietors: Ernst Renz in Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere, and the Franconi dynasty in Paris\u2014the center of sophisticated European circus. There are several photographs of the sisters, including those taken by court photographers in Vienna and Breslau. They share soft, rounded features, dark-shadowed eyes, and tightly curled hair. Clotilde looks fairer than \u00c9milie; both have fashionable sloping shoulders and smooth, corseted waists. Clotilde eventually specialized in acrobatic work on what one German newspaper delightfully referred to as a \u201cnudelbrettschimmel<\/em>\u201d or \u201cnoodle-board gray\u201d with a flat, broad back that made an excellent base for leaps and pirouettes. \u00c9milie ascended into the most prestigious role for a woman in that era\u2019s circus: a soloist dressage rider who also jumped high fences in the tiny ring. She became known as \u201cLa Petite Loisset\u201d by her increasingly devoted fans. The next year transformed their sisterhood\u2014and cleared the stage for \u00c9milie\u2019s growing celebrity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Press illustration of \u00c9milie, age twenty-two, performing at the Cirque des Champs-Elys\u00e9es in Paris. Courtesy of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In August 1879, Clotilde caused a continent-wide scandal by marrying Prince Heinrich XX Reuss zu K\u00f6stritz, the third son of the royal family of Reuss, a German state in what is now Thuringia. That a circus performer\u2014and one whose acts included not just vaulting and a \u201cgastronomic horse\u201d but also cross-dressing\u2014could marry directly into the aristocracy was not without precedent (one of the girls\u2019 aunts, Victoire, had married a Comte di Rossi in the 1860s). Der Floh<\/em> joked that Clotilde had truly gotten \u201ca kingdom for a horse,\u201d but the consequences were swift: the prince was demoted to Baron von Reichenfels, had his inheritance cut, and he was thrown out of the Prussian Army.<\/p>\n

The new Baron von Reichenfels was something of a playboy, a gambler who\u2019d won big at Baden Baden and blown the money taking his friends to Paris. He was a good rider who was seen at the circus or theater every night in Berlin, and a ladies\u2019 man. He was already under a form of state financial guardianship for his exuberant spending, and now intended to leave with Clotilde for the Bulgarian royal court to seek employment. Here, the story takes a detour into rumor.<\/p>\n

The combination of money, circus, and aristocracy was irresistible to the European press, and few journalists hesitated to run stories without a source or justification. I found a number stating that, in fact, the baron had had a lucky landing because Clotilde and \u00c9milie were wealthy in their own right, as an aunt had given them 100,000 francs apiece. Which aunt this could be, I have no idea, as they had so many. Caroline Loyo was tucked away in a village on minuscule income; the ice-cream business was long since busted (and Jean-Joseph was the son of a farmer, not a duke); other aunts I can pinpoint were bound up in the circus. Perhaps Victoire, now a widow, had passed on some of the Comte di Rossi\u2019s money\u2014or perhaps the entire story was fake.<\/p>\n

The other strand of stories concerns \u00c9milie directly. When she performed at the Salamonski Circus in Berlin, it was said that the biggest bouquets were left at the stables for her by Franz Edmund Joseph Gabriel Vitus von Hatzfeldt, prince of Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg\u2014best truncated to Prince Hatzfeldt from here on\u2014another horsey German aristocratic sportsman, this time from Prussia. The Morgenpost <\/em>claimed that the Baron von Reichenfels had only been able to marry Clotilde because Hatzfeldt wanted \u00c9milie\u2019s hand and did not want to marry her \u201cdirect from the circus,\u201d so had paid the young Russian an allowance to keep his new sister-in-law out of the ring. L\u2019Intransigeant<\/em> said Hatzfeldt had been granted permission to marry \u00c9milie by the German emperor himself. \u201cHup! Hup!\u201d trilled L\u2019Univers Illustr\u00e9e<\/em>, \u201cthe century\u2019s going hell for leather.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now \u00c9milie begins to emerge from this stork\u2019s nest of gossipy newsprint as a three-dimensional person\u2014a woman marked not by death or sex, but by will power, ambition, and pride. The association with Hatzfeldt stuck, and after her death, many prominent sources and even circus history authorities claimed she was engaged to him and would have married him when the season ended. I do not believe this was the case. L\u2019Intransig\u00e9ant<\/em>\u2019s theater editor, Georges Meusey, said she had refused the prince because she did not like him, and was \u201ca woman of great sense.\u201d She certainly did not retire from the ring\u2014on the contrary, she became more famous, audacious, and celebrated.<\/p>\n

It was perhaps around this time that she had a motto engraved onto the head of her whip, reading: \u201cA princess wouldn\u2019t deign to; a queen could not; I am Loisset.\u201d The circus connoisseur Baron de Vaux claimed that this was a statement of intent\u2014that \u00c9milie refused to make a match any more lowly than the one Clotilde had achieved. It strikes me as the opposite: \u00c9milie was saying she did not need to be royalty to outride and outdare her social superiors. She already mingled with aristocrats. She was already a better horsewoman than most of them. She proclaims her own name\u2014her individuality, her skill\u2014to stand above them.<\/p>\n

After her death, a writer in Gil Blas<\/em> recalled a conversation between \u00c9milie and an aristocratic lady:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you, mademoiselle, when will you become a princess?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, me? I am and will remain Princess Daredevil.\u201d<\/p>\n

To others fretting about the stunts she undertook in the ring, she laughed, and said, \u201cBah! What will happen will happen \u2026 And can you really see me dying with white hair, feeble and with rheumatism?”<\/p>\n

And what stunts: Arnold Mortier said she could transform \u201cblood horses into docile instruments.\u201d Her haute \u00e9cole routine sounds as though most of it took place in the air, with her Arabian stallion Mahomet leaping on his hind legs about the ring with nothing but \u201ca little touch to his reins.\u201d A wag in Vienna wished that politicians could learn by watching as \u00c9milie, with barely a nudge, made her horse spin and step from left to right; if only they could control public opinion and their colleagues so easily.<\/p>\n

She had two horses called Pour Toujours and J\u2019Y Pense whose identities are perpetually muddled by people who write about her life, and which I have been unable to untangle. One was her jumper, and he is the one who matters most. On Pour Toujours (or J\u2019Y Pense), a dark bay (or black), tricky Irish (or English) thoroughbred (or hunter), she jumped enormous obstacles, including a table set for dinner with candelabras. In 1880, he tripped on the table, somersaulting over \u00c9milie and dislocating her shoulder\u2014she never showed fear, it was said, just injured pride. \u201cA tough woman! And so small!!!\u201d one audience member was overheard saying after a performance.<\/p>\n

Franconi advised her to get rid of the horse, but as Albert Wolff wrote later, \u201cthe danger was an additional attraction for her.\u201d One elder statesman of equestrianism told her that she was too tough\u2014he warned her that her harsh hands would be the death of her. \u201cAre you telling me that as a prophet or a friend?\u201d she asked with a smile. \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about your predictions in \u2026 twenty years.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a dual quality to \u00c9milie\u2019s life at this time: her bravado in the ring and her celebrity are ranged against repeated accounts of a modest, single-minded loner. After her mother\u2019s death in 1880 and Clotilde\u2019s retirement from the circus, she traveled only with a maid and a huge, white shaggy dog called Turc who followed her everywhere and slept at the foot of her bed. She would live alone in a small apartment near the circus at which she was engaged, and was said to enjoy books, music, and art, and receive few guests. She would only permit admirers to give her flowers\u2014she had no interest in jewelry or more lucrative tokens. When her followers crammed into the circus stables to see her, she offered them only \u201cbanal\u201d smiles calculated to be polite but not enticing. Not that that mattered. The circus managers issued invitations to every aristocrat in town as soon as her first performance was scheduled, feeding on Clotilde\u2019s notoriety. Some of the writing about her is feverish: \u201cOur little queen!\u201d \u201cThe most beautiful will-o-the-wisp anyone could imagine!\u201d \u201cA female centaur!\u201d \u201cThe diva of equitation, the Patti of haute \u00e9cole, the most intrepid amazone<\/em>, the most charming, the most dizzying experience since the advent of the Amazons!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWill she marry?\u201d asked Scapin. \u201cThe lucky mortal whom she will choose will do well to think about two things: beneath that eternal smile is a will of iron that must get whatever she wishes.\u201d For every ecstatic paean to her ash-blonde curls, slender figure, and blue eyes, there is a comment about her ambition and the fact that \u201cshe loves her metier ardently \u2026 and nothing else!\u201d \u201cHer success fills her heart enough,\u201d wrote Arnold Mortier. The contrast between this ambition and her girlish style seemed to delight her fans. Albert Wolff, who was part of her circle, said she had American manners\u2014by which he meant she was at ease in the company of men\u2014and that when he and Carmen<\/em> librettist Henri Meilhac dined at the Pavillon Henri IV with \u00c9milie and others, \u201cshe was like a spoilt child whom everyone sought to spoil more.\u201d<\/p>\n

A writer in Gil Blas<\/em> described the way her \u201csomewhat disdainful coquetry was highly amused by the commotion she provoked \u2026 she enjoyed igniting these fires through which she passed, like a salamander, without being burned. Ultimately, she had only one devotion, her profession, and an absolute desire to conquer the public.\u201d One source claims that those burned included not just Hatzfeldt but also the Crown Prince of Austria, who wanted her \u201cto become his Dubarry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether this is true or not, I have no idea\u2014there are many cases of mistaken identity in these reports\u2014but she did come into the orbit of the Crown Prince. She was adored by his mother, the Empress Elisabeth, or Sisi, herself an unflinching and brilliant horsewoman who had lessons in circus horsemanship from both \u00c9milie and her colleague and rival, the Austrian \u00e9cuy\u00e8re <\/em>Elisa Petzold. Both were guests at G\u00f6d\u00f6ll\u0151, the hunting lodge outside Budapest where the empress\u2019s coterie of sporting aristocrats hunted, tried circus tricks, and raced in relative liberty away from the stuffier court.<\/p>\n

One of the young men in Sisi\u2019s circle was a Hungarian magnate named Count Elem\u00e9r de Batthy\u00e1ny. Such were the freedoms at G\u00f6d\u00f6ll\u0151 that he was allowed to deliberately blank the emperor himself because his father, Lajos, a former prime minister of Hungary, had been executed for treason by one of the Franz Joseph\u2019s generals in 1849. A handsome man with a neat beard, the younger Batthy\u00e1ny was a leading light in the Budapest Jockey Club who had once embarked on an unsuccessful balloon flight from Paris to his home, and had made a sporting journey around the world, lion and elephant hunting in India, ibex stalking in Tibet, passing through China, the East Indies, Japan, and taking a train across America. He sent home two Bengal tigers from this grand tour.<\/p>\n

Around September 1881, a handful of newspapers across Europe announced that \u00c9milie was engaged to Count Elem\u00e9r. \u201cIt looks like the Austrian [sic] nobility are stealing all our horsewomen,\u201d said Le Globe<\/em>. A Berlin paper reported that she was still under contract to Ernst Renz, so the count would have to buy her out or wait, but that her conduct had always been immaculate and she was a worthy bride. In Belgium, La Meuse <\/em>commented that \u201cthis m\u00e9salliance<\/em> has turned all those devils of Austrian high society into a Chabanais\u201d\u2014the name of a notorious brothel frequented by the Jockey Club in Paris.<\/p>\n

In early 1882, \u00c9milie was twenty-five and a half years old, lionized, adored, perhaps in love, perhaps engaged, still quickened by ambition. She was contracted to perform for six months at the Cirque des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es in Paris\u2014her beloved hometown. On April 17, she had been in Paris for eight days, taking in horse shows and preparing her acts with each of four horses at the Cirque d\u2019Hiver, a grand twenty-sided drum of a building that still stands on the rue Amelot in the eleventh arrondissement. She practiced first on Mahomet, and then on Pour Toujours\/J\u2019Y Pense at two in the afternoon. She was rehearsing her high-risk entrance, in which the horse galloped into the ring, clearing the table in his path, and she saluted the audience.<\/p>\n

Pour Toujours\/J\u2019y Pense refused the makeshift table, and \u00c9milie caught him a few lashes with her whip. The horse spun and galloped back toward his box, but the massive iron door that sealed the stables from the ring had been closed. He slid into the door, hooves stumbling over one another, and reared up. A second of suspension and then he went over backward and landed on \u00c9milie. The fork of her sidesaddle rammed into her abdomen, driven by the full weight of the horse. There was no blood or broken skin. When Franconi and others rushed to help her, she could only say, over and over, \u201cI am broken; I will die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some accounts say she walked, supported by the circus doctors\u2014who knew this was hopeless\u2014back to the small apartment at 5 rue Oberkampf, where she was staying with another Loisset aunt. They sent a telegraph to Clotilde and fetched her father from his home in Maisons-Laffitte. At 5 A.M.<\/small> she lost her mind, convinced she was late for her performance, asking for the time, singing her entrance music (\u201cLa Valse des Gardes\u201d) between vomiting. At 9 A.M.<\/small> the following morning, her aunt closed her eyelids for the last time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The death of \u00c9milie Loisset, as imagined in the January 7, 1882, issue of L\u2019Univers Illustr\u00e9<\/em>. Courtesy of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Her coffin was lost under wreaths of white flowers and bouquets. The mourners\u2014her family, the sportsmen, the circus and hippodrome stars and managers, the journalists, the aristocrats\u2014marched slowly through streets lined with subdued locals. The church was too small to contain the crowd. Another strange detail crops up: some accounts say that as her coffin entered, it passed another leaving\u2014that of an \u00e9cuy\u00e8re <\/em>from the Hippodrome who had died after an accident on the same day as \u00c9milie\u2019s. I have found no record of this woman\u2019s death but think it may be another of these fanciful elisions that mine the coverage of \u00c9milie: nearly a year before her death, a twenty-four-year-old \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> called Fanny Ghyka had died of gangrene after her leg was crushed by her horse in the middle of a Hippodrome performance. Fanny, who had her own story, became a \u201cfetch\u201d sent to return \u00c9milie to the underworld.<\/p>\n

\u00c9milie was buried with three generations of her family at Maisons-Laffitte Cemetery. Clotilde, once again, fainted. La Libert\u00e9<\/em> visited the Cirque d\u2019Hiver to stare at the spot where \u00c9milie had been crushed and to sigh. Octave Mirbeau, another fan, writing as \u201cGardeniac\u201d in his Petits Po\u00e8mes Parisiens<\/em>, called her \u201cchastity on horseback,\u201d \u201ca woman whom scandals never grazed.\u201d He imagines her in a host of pale, female ghosts, and quotes Victor Hugo: \u201cThe dead today were once the beautiful!\u201d<\/p>\n

The detail of the mysterious Hippodrome \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> reminded me that the fictionalization of \u00c9milie\u2019s death began even before it occurred. Days before her accident, a pseudonymous novel had been published by an \u201cAlain Bauquenne.\u201d L\u2019\u00c9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> tells the story of a proud and aloof Finnish \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> called Julia Forsell who is ruined by an Austro-Hungarian aristocratic clique and later kills herself in an elaborate and lurid fashion midperformance. Some of the details of Julia\u2019s portrayal sound familiar (\u201ca reigning prince of Taxis had promised her marriage, if she\u2019d given up the circus, and she\u2019d pulled away her hand\u201d). The press latched it directly to \u00c9milie\u2019s death: \u201cThese pages seem like a sort of grievous prediction, and the fatal event gives them, by its sad reality, a powerful revival of interest,\u201d said Le Monde Illustr\u00e9<\/em>. Le Figaro<\/em>: \u201cThe last chapter seems to reproduce the details of this terrible death; we present these pages, which seemed particularly interesting to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of May, the Democratic Statesman<\/em> in America was reporting that an \u201cardent admirer\u201d of \u00c9milie\u2019s had published a novel in which a heroine modeled on her was killed in the ring, because he wanted her to leave the circus. It was true that the author of L\u2019\u00c9cuy\u00e8re <\/em>was a devotee of \u00c9milie\u2014albeit one who viewed women as born to sexually torment men, and who used \u00c9milie\u2019s real surname in another novel to portray his own mistress (who also sought to be an \u00e9cuy\u00e8re<\/em>). L\u2019\u00c9cuy\u00e8re<\/em> is most probably the work of Octave Mirbeau, although I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s the key to the secrets of \u00c9milie\u2019s life. As the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Octave Mirbeau points out, the rape of Julia by a venal marquis seems to echo Mirbeau\u2019s own rape by a Jesuit priest as a child rather than anything likely to have happened\u2014to Mirbeau\u2019s knowledge\u2014to La Petite Loisset. But the weird morbidity of the novel persisted: by 1897, a Gil Blas<\/em> correspondent was claiming that some thought \u00c9milie\u2019s death had been a suicide. Postmortem, she appears in another French novel, La Petite Lambton<\/em>, once more virtuous, romantic, and doomed. The wistful \u00c9milie, the tragic beauty, the victim\u2014not the ambitious, girlish, loner horsewoman\u2014became the story I saw repeated decades later.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve succeeded in reclaiming a definitive \u00c9milie from this mythologizing\u2014not when so many inconsistencies and questions have hatched before my eyes\u2014but I hope that, by overlaying these texts, I\u2019ve given one \u00c9milie a chance to once more walk untouched through the fires in her salamander form. She balanced\u2014sideways\u2014not just on her horse but, like many women of her era and today, on a tightrope of skewed social expectations: a good girl with ambitions, a daredevil with a chaperone, a \u201clittle Queen\u201d who turned down a prince and might have married a count.<\/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

Read more installments of \u00c9cuy\u00e8res.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who was \u00c9milie Loisset? In fiction, journalism, and even riding manuals, her death is reenacted over and over as melodrama, cautionary tale, and plot twist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60893],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-151338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecuyeres","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe \u201cPrincess Daredevil\u201d of the Belle \u00c9poque by Susanna Forrest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Who was \u00c9milie Loisset? 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