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.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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
eBook ISBN 9780812998788
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Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Gabriele Wilson
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
1928
Saturday, 11:30 A.M.
Tuesday, 31 July
Friday, 11 A.M.
Saturday, 9:30 A.M.
Monday, Four O’Clock
Wednesday, Midnight
Sunday Evening
Tuesday
Monday, Midnight
Friday Morning
Wednesday
14 December
1929
Monday, Eleven O’Clock
Friday, Four O’Clock
Saturday, Eleven O’Clock
Wednesday Morning
Thursday, Nine in the Evening
Friday, Eleven O’Clock
Saturday, Eleven O’Clock
Friday, Midnight
Sunday Evening
Thursday Evening, Half Past Nine
Saturday Morning
Saturday Evening
Friday, Three O’Clock
Wednesday, Five O’Clock
Monday, 4:30 P.M.
Thursday, 14 November 1929
Thursday, Ten O’Clock
Sunday Evening
31 December 1929
1930
Thursday Morning
Thursday, 5:30 P.M.
Thursday, Midnight
Friday Evening
Friday, Gone Midnight
Thursday Evening
Friday Evening
Friday, Well Past Midnight
Tuesday Evening
Wednesday Morning, Five O’Clock
Friday Evening, Eleven O’Clock
Postscript
About the Editor
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 w
ould 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.
JYB
January 2016
SATURDAY, 11:30 A.M.
Forgive me, darling, if this note is too brief…I am short of time, because you know I would have plenty to say to you if only I could!
Today you will have only tender thoughts from me, only a kiss on your beloved lips and your pretty brown eyes, but I shall be by your side in spirit. And you, beloved, will you think of me? Yes, I hope so, and I do hope to have a little note from you in Monday’s post.
Darling, I should like to see you one evening this week if at all possible because I so long for your touch that it will be too endless to wait until Saturday.
I want another taste of the passionate moments of our last meeting…the memory of your touch is peculiarly unsettling to me, and I want to be in your arms again feeling the wonderful sensations you give me. Loved one, I want you to love me with all the ardor of your desire, I want you to make me come furiously with your perverse couplings. Beloved darling, tell me that, like me, you want to feel my touch again, tell me also that you are happy in my arms, so very happy, and that you love me…
Be good, my adored lover. Keep your perverted fondling for me, keep it for me alone, I want to love you like that forever and ever.
Goodbye, my beloved little god. Till Monday I hope!
Give me your wonderful body, I want to hold it in my arms, hold it tight until I am imbued with its intoxicating smell. I am pressing my lips to yours in a deep kiss that comes from the bottom of my heart, my heart, which is filled with you, nothing but you.
All my most tender thoughts, my loved one. I love you.
Simone
My darling love,
How wonderful yesterday evening was…All that time spent close to you had aroused me, and your pneumatique* was enough to intoxicate me altogether. All those passionate words were deliciously exciting, and once I was in my great big bed in the dark of my own room, I was not very well behaved. I perfumed my whole body before slipping between those cool sheets, as if you were to come and join me there.
With my head on my pillow I conjure images of my darling little god. I run one hand slowly over my entire body, which gradually starts to quiver. My hand moves from my breasts down to my thighs, drifting briefly into the warm pelt and then sliding farther down. Under the effects of a double fondling, a boundless sense of delight steals over every inch of me. I am shivering with pleasure at this stage because I am thinking of you with all my might. When I come it is so powerful I have to restrain myself from crying out. Charles, darling Charles, yes, tomorrow I shall treat you to the enticing performance you so long to see. When I reach my devastating climax, you will take all of me so I have no time to recover, so that a second climax still stronger than the first carries me deeper into pleasure.
Tomorrow, darling beloved, we can act out all our fantasies.
I have to stop again. I do not have time to say everything I should like to say.
Till later, my loved one. I love you.
Simone
* * *
* Pneumatiques, better known by the diminutive term pneus, were a very Parisian means of transmitting mail. They were devised in 1866 by Henri Rouart, a painter, inventor, and industrialist, in order to provide a link between the Grand Hotel near the opera house and the Bourse (the Paris stock exchange). Aside from this initial usage, they began to be used more widely in 1879 and were not phased out until 1984, supplanted by faxes and then emails. Some 120 post offices had the infrastructure to send letters via a system of compressed air tubes, traveling up to one kilometer per minute. The user would buy a prestamped sheet from a post office and could write up to twenty lines on one side of the sheet; this was then folded by sticking together the edges, and the address was written on the other side. The tubes of compressed air formed a network all over Paris, and only minutes after the letter had been sent a postman would be on hand to deliver the pneu to the addressee. In its day it was a means of communicating in “real time.” Although they have disappeared from modern-day post offices, such systems are still in use in some French institutions and large government offices. When I was a junior diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, once or twice a year it was part of your service to do a night shift in a very spartan room next to the minister’s palace. You would be awakened throughout the night by the horrendous noise of the plastic tubes containing emergency cables that would fall into their compartments just above the small bed. An inconvenience that has now been forgotten, thanks to the emergence of more silent, electronic devices.
TUESDAY, 31 JULY
My dear darling,
Thank you for your last long letter. You are a darling writing to me like that, it makes me so happy when I see the little white envelope in the box! I too would have been very sad had you not replied straightaway…I love you! My dear love, I simply cannot get away from here before Sunday evening. Believe me, my beloved, just like you I ardently long for our next tryst. Every ounce of my being is straining toward you, calling to the exquisite lover that you are, that you will always be. No, darling love, I shall never tire of you, you can be sure of that. I have been too happy in your arms and I already know what pleasure I shall feel when you take me again…I am already envisioning our next meeting. You will make me suffer cruelly, my body belongs to you and it will squirm beneath your blows, you will hear me begging for mercy…And your longing for me will be all the more violent because I shall press my skin against yours, I shall wrap all of you in my quivering thighs, my mouth will seek out your lips to bruise them with fierce kisses. My loved one, you will take me the way you like best, and our passionate embrace will transport us both to the boundless pleasure that only such embraces can bring. The most perverse of couplings, you say? What of it, darling Charles, what I want above all else is for you to be happy in my arms. So I am at your orders, my darling master! If you only knew how I long to nestle in your arms! I so want to be back beside your body, which has afforded me such ecstasies…
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