Tarbell’s account, carried by the Boston Transcript on October 20, 1893, expressed surprise that this woman was no suffragist. She cited La Séverine’s letter to the Woman Suffrage League of France, declining to be a political candidate: “I do not see the pleasure of universal suffrage, whatever the sex which participates in it, and it isn’t when an apple is rotten that it should be bitten … Since I am so far ‘behind’ as a woman, so proud of the self-denying and maternal role which nature has given me that I do not care to attempt to overthrow masculine ambitions, and so ‘advanced’ as a blue stocking that I am rather skeptical of the usefulness of a vote, I feel I am ripe only to abstain.” Consciously or not, Tarbell closely paraphrased these words in a private letter twenty years later.
Tarbell was more amused than inspired by Jeanne Dieulafoy. Archaeologist and author of a book on Persia, she smoked cigars and wore, with the necessary permission of the French government, men’s trousers. She explained she had picked up this strange habit when she went on excavations with her late husband. Ida found her a “pretty man” of immaculate if incongruous appearance who delighted in patting Ida on the knee to make her blush. Dieulafoy encouraged her to write a history of women starting with Eve. The idea did intrigue Ida, but what actually resulted was “The Relation of Woman to the French Institute.” In this Ida said that woman’s impact on the Académie Française was indirect—Voltaire had attributed his election to Mme de Pompadour and remarked it was more important to be on good terms with the king’s mistress than to have written a hundred volumes. Quite dispassionately, perhaps in agreement that women should be forced to meet the highest standards, Tarbell expressed the hope that a woman of exceptional talent would be the first elected so as to make admission to the academy “comparatively simple for women of lesser talent.” (That first place was offered in 1981 to Marguerite Yourcenar.)
Had selection been up to Ida, the academy might have admitted Arvéde Barine. In private life Mme Cécile Vincens, Barine had translated Tolstoy’s “Souvenirs” and written sketches of George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Carlyle. Thanks to Ida’s efforts she had also appeared in The Chautauquan in translation, but Barine may not have been informed of that fact. Barine minimized her achievements although they involved mastery of Russian, Italian, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish, and French. In Barine, Ida saw a vision of herself as she wished to be. Her description for the Boston Transcript called “A Paris Press Woman,” and published December 16, 1893, was close to the highly personal I-littered style of 1890s French periodicals.
In that piece, Ida summed up woman’s progress in journalism: they had succeeded as editors, journalists, and novelists—in all areas where “pluck, prompt action and racy writing are necessary,” yet women had not produced a writer of “sustained, brilliant, virile, authentic biographical, historical or scientific articles.” Women advanced by their grace, fancy, and femininity, not by “their grasp of a subject, their largeness of learning, their skill in treatment.” She saw a place to be filled: “… the woman who has the power and the learning to do scholarly and interesting magazine articles and reviews will win appreciation and position long before she has to go a-begging. However … an apprentice as a reporter and editor is not enough. Sincere study with constant writing are the only means by which one can arrive at the goal.”
Six years earlier she had written that ambitious women could succeed as journalists provided they had a rare constellation of talents—power to work incessantly, varied knowledge, a good English style, self-control, and the power of growing. Now she saw that these could take a woman only to the second rank. In order to excel in letters, a woman must understand and interpret facts as well as know them. Tarbell proclaimed that the accomplished female must possess “the power to grasp immediately the salient features of a subject, to see its true color and to add to it facts, comparisons, opinions which shall help others to comprehend your exposition of it. It means the power to express all this in easy clear language with enough humor to entertain, enough seriousness to impress without fatiguing. The power to write in this way is not a natural gift, nor is it attained in two or three years of practice. It is the result of a ripened mind and long practice.” At the end of this article on Barine she admitted she had written it to provide a model to women in American journalism who wished to do serious and lasting work but did not know how to go about it. “It is not an easy model which I offer, I admit. But it is worth following.”
She had written her manifesto.
Five
The French Salon
The French literary world was now open to Ida, good fortune she credited to her ability to get names mentioned in American periodicals. She was judicious about where she went and how often she visited, because she could not easily repay hospitality. Jo, Mary, Annie Towle, and she had had at-homes during which they boiled tea on an alcohol lamp, but she could not imagine Mme Blanc enjoying such “a lark” nor could she picture Arvéde Barine conversing in Ida’s room at Rue Malebranche. But with her serviceable black dress, quick wit, and professional contacts, she did enter French intellectual society.
Through Mme Blanc she met a writer for the Revue des Deux Mondes who invited her to join an opera party that evening, adding that she must go décolleté. Agreeing nonchalantly, Ida sped home, cut the sleeves from her light silk dress, removed the collar, and attached a mass of tulle. By the time the writer arrived to fetch her, she had managed to find a feather for her hair. Now she could sit in a box at the Opéra beside two women dripping diamonds, across from the president of the republic, and convince herself, as she smoothed out her long gloves, that she managed to hold her own. No one would guess that she wrote home that night begging her family to send one- two- and three- cent stamps that she could sell at a profit to tide her over while she waited for McClure’s checks. She also asked for the names of the notables (Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Andrew Jackson) who were commemorated on the stamps in case she was asked. Before sealing the letter, she enclosed a lock of hair. “Observe the color,” she demanded. “If you don’t think I suffer from being away from my family, look at that.”1
Work—and going hatless—had dulled it. Paris was experiencing its hottest summer ever recorded. Ida routinely arose at six, thirsty and fighting fleas, reached the Bibliothèque before it opened and spent the day poring over Mme Roland’s papers. “I could not afford to hire anyone to copy them for me, so I did it all myself. I wasn’t experienced enough to know just what I should need; anyway, I was afraid I might have to go home before the book was finished. So I copied endless pages. When the library closed, I would go down to the Seine and take a ride on one of the little steamers to rest and cool off. I could afford this for it cost only three cents.”2
Living research material was soon provided. Through the English poet Mary Robinson and her scholarly French husband James Darmesteter, Ida gained an introduction to Léon Marillier, the great-great-grandson of Manon Phlipon Roland, and a professor of the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. Not only did he freely lend her a large number of essays which Roland had prepared at the age of twenty on topics from “Suicide” to “The Good Man” and drafts of letters to her girlhood friend, but he also introduced her to the family circle that included his mother Cécile and her lover, Charles Seignobos, who had been the family tutor and was now crowned by the academy for his scholarship in history.
Ida became a regular at the Marillier salons, meeting there people like Lucien Herr whose protégés in socialism included both Léon Blum, future premier of France, and Jean Jaurès, a future Socialist party leader.
Ida, nicknamed “Mademoiselle Mees” (for “Miss”), was one of the rare women at these gatherings. Polite society had closed to Mme Marillier after she left her husband to live openly with her sons’ former tutor. Madame both welcomed the female companionship Ida offered and was sometimes jealous of the acceptance the American woman enjoyed. Irrationally fearing that she would soon die
, and possessing the magnanimity of many Frenchwomen toward their young lovers, Mme Marillier wanted Seignobos, fifteen years her junior and a few years older than Tarbell, to marry the younger American. Ida thought he liked her well enough to do it, but wanted no part of the arrangement.3 Despite Mme Marillier’s marital plans for her, it was not for months, until the two women spent a fortnight at Le Clos, the Rolands’ ancestral home, that Cécile Marillier and Ida became friendly.
Seignobos and his students did not fail to perceive both Ida’s spirit and the reticence she cloaked it with. On one occasion, Mme Marillier was too ill to serve as hostess to the bright male students, so Seignobos rushed at Ida when she arrived and danced about her crying the French equivalent of “You’re to be mistress! You’re to be mistress of the house!” Ida decided to outwit him and described the results as follows: “They thought it would frighten me for they take a malicious sort of pleasure in seeing me blush[ing] or disconcerted … I staid [sic] in that masculine wilderness until ten o’clock. I then fled. Ever since they have treated me with more respect. ‘She didn’t get frightened’ [they said]. It is very funny. I think they regard me as a sort of specimen, and like to see what I’ll do under different conditions. They can’t get used to the idea of a woman really working …”4
Ida had pined for the conversation of the French salon, but once included, she sat wide-eyed and very quiet. Her French was inadequate and women were not expected to contribute anyway, but she noticed the men did not always know their facts, especially when they spoke of America. Her main contribution was Henry Wickham Steed, whom Ida forced on the group despite his Englishness. Steed, some fifteen years younger than Ida, was a fellow student at the Sorbonne and eager to know Seignobos and his favorites better. She and the young Englishman were so fond of each other that some erroneously guessed they were lovers.5
Tarbell thought of the salon as “the meeting place of some of the most vigorous spirits of the Latin Quarter … a seat of learning and wit unique in its kind.”6 The flaw Steed detected in it was that logic and intellect ruled at the expense of instinct, but he was inestimably grateful to Ida for introducing him to the French intellectual circles. In 1920, he sent her a picture inscribed “To My Fairy Godmother.” By that time he was editor of the London Times.
Ida’s favorite among Seignobos’ circle was Charles Borgeaud, a Swiss scholar of constitutional law a few years younger than she. Borgeaud often took her to dinner or cafés after evening lectures, or saw her home after soirées. When an assignment for McClure took her to Geneva where Borgeaud had gone for the summer, he introduced her to his mother, a woman Ida found terrifying. A slip of her pen in a letter home was inarticulate but revealing. In describing the church of Brou which she saw soon after leaving Geneva, she wrote: “This church is the work of a woman and erected in honor of a mother-in-law, so I feel I must take it all in, both for the sake of the sex and my future condition in life.”7
Whether or not she thought she might one day be a daughter-in-law, she was certainly merry around Borgeaud. Ida wrote John Vincent: “How often do I see your friend B? Tiens! You may be sure it is not my fault when I do not see him. He is dining opposite me this minute and sends you mille amitiés (He doesn’t know what I’ve written here).”
If she discovered “the boy” at Allegheny College, in Paris she discovered the escort. “Keeping company” in the Latin Quarter was not courting and had no more significance than one wanted to give it. Ida’s French tutor, Mme Goinbaut, who had amazed Ida early on by helping a young lover make a profitable marriage, marveled at Ida’s luck in never being without a cavalier. Americans also figured on her roster of escorts. There was a Mr. DeFields, an Allegheny College professor who called on her once a week to assail her with his logic, reduce her opinions to formulae, and adduce the contrary of her every statement.
There was also George F. Southard, who had come to head Standard Oil in France. Referred by Laura Seaver Wheeler, her childhood friend, he called on Ida in a crush hat and opera coat. The maid showed him into Ida’s tiny box of a room where no fire was lit and the hostess sat in her work clothes. He was taken aback—as any dandy would be in the presence of the genteel poor—yet she put him so at ease that he stayed three hours and took her to dinner the following Sunday. She allowed herself to hobnob with a general director of Standard Oil on the grounds that he was married and safe—and scheduled to return to his wife. She may also have enjoyed doing some informal spy work. Over dinner one evening, he told her that Standard Oil was establishing refineries at Rouen and Marseilles. She promptly sent this intelligence off to her parents and advised, “I suppose these are secrets and I prefer you shouldn’t say anything about them as coming from me.”8 In time-honored journalistic tradition, she would allow them to retail the news as they wished, as long as they protected their source.
She was also sought after by editors as well as gentlemen callers. Edward Livermore Burlingame, like McClure, visited her obscure dwelling. Editor of Scribner’s, he was about forty-five, well-educated to the point of intimidation, and the son of a famous envoy to China. Burlingame was exacting and reasonable and never promised what he could not produce. He announced to Ida that his magazine would publish her article on Mme Roland and the firm would publish the Roland biography. Excited, she wrote to her family: “I know I can make a good and fresh book if I have leisure. I’ve a mass of material and the help of the family itself. The bread-and-butter problem is all that prevents my having the book done … but I’m going to do it and do it well if it takes five years. You know what that means. I can’t go home this year. I dare not think about it but so long as you are all well and happy, I’ll stick to my work here.”9
Typically, the Roland biography was not the only project on which she was hard at work. McClure continued to give her assignments as well. Once her series on French women writers was completed, he asked her to interview the great Louis Pasteur. She was as awed by his achievement in vanquishing hydrophobia and purifying milk as she was appalled by how feeble he had become.
She found Pasteur with his wife in their carpeted library. He who had grappled with mad dogs now sat, elbow on his desk, head resting in his hand, wearing a silken skullcap over iron-gray hair. His left side was paralyzed. He spoke haltingly, moved uneasily, and was so warmly human that she was tempted to feel at home. She met the scientist in the twilight of his life when he was as interested in his family album as he had once been in bacteria. He seemed to accept that his work was done. “If I have a regret it is that I did not follow … the study of crystals. A sudden turn threw me into the study of fermentation [which had led to sanitary processing of milk, beer, and wine] … I am still inconsolable to think that I never had time to go back to my old subject,”10 he told her. In her article, she summed him up in a way that indicated her own sense of inferiority: “This is a great man, one feels instinctively. A man so great that he despises notoriety and a journalist. It is reassuring.” But she also carried away the memory of an old man’s trepidations. He was so concerned that she would trip on her way out that he peered out over the railing as she went down the stairs.
Part of her story on Pasteur included an interview with Pierre Émile Roux, the functioning head of the Pasteur Institute, who clearly preferred research to giving interviews. Tarbell kept pressing him on the matter of whether he expected to conquer diphtheria as well as hydrophobia. Roux, a slight, fortyish man who had been devoting his nights to the subject for years, was sensitive on this topic that had consumed his life, but he told her the institute was testing the work of Emil von Behring in Berlin, which seemed very promising. “This is absolutely our last word on diphtheria,” he insisted, closing the subject. In fact, Roux and Behring perfected the diphtheria serum in 1894.
Pasteur read Ida’s published article with chuckling delight, according to a letter she wrote her family. Later she called on him again, and he asked for a replacement copy—Dr. Élie Metchnikoff, pioneer in immunology, had carried off the first
magazine because he liked his own picture so much.
After she submitted her story, McClure assured her she had a secure position at his magazine as soon as she was ready to come home. She was thorough and accurate, could quickly grasp and explain the substance of what scientists were discovering. Others could do human interest pieces, but Ida Tarbell could explain facts.
McClure then commissioned her to write on new methods of criminal identification. Alphonse Bertillon had developed a method of measuring the head, spine, feet, and fingers of malefactors and plotting their moles and scars for cross-reference. His system would later give way to simple fingerprinting, but in its day, anthropometry was an exciting technique. On her way to his office, Ida accidentally locked herself in the prison stairwell with a criminal who was as astonished as she to be in the predicament. Rescued and taken to Bertillon, she and a man who had poached rabbits posed for their criminal identification cards. Hers revealed a serious and somewhat nonplussed Ida Tarbell with a lock of hair falling over the incriminating dimension of her ear. She sent her own card home to Titusville as a souvenir, but for McClure’s she obtained the card of the murderous Ravachol, Paris’s most infamous anarchist.
She also produced “A Chemical Detective Bureau: The Paris Municipal Laboratory and What It Does for Public Health.” In this article, laced with humor, she said the lab could uncover cost-cutting “vintners” who tried to dispense with grape juice in wine and inadvertently poisoned their patrons.
Ida observed that the French demanded an explanation when coffee was muddy, milk blue, and wine sour, and she saw who suffered first from adulterated food: “One realizes here, perhaps as never before, what it means to be poor—that you are the first victim, not alone of epidemic and contagion, but of man’s violence and fraud; that because you have not great things, the little that you have shall be taken away. [One] realizes too, what such a service may do towards restoring the quality of the poor man’s food.”11
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