The Angel and the Perverts

by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Anna Livia (Translator)

Set in the lesbian and gay circles of Paris in the 1920s, The Angel and the Perverts tells the story of a hermaphrodite born to upper class parents in Normandy and ignorant of his/her physical difference. As an adult, s/he lives a double life as Marion/Mario, passing undetected as a lesbian in the literary salons of the times, and as a gay man in the cocaine dens made famous by Colette.
Delarue-Mardrus's novel belongs to a category of literature, written between the turn of the century and approximately 1930, which depicted lesbians as members of a third sex. The hermaphrodite became the visual representation of the ways in which lesbians were different from their heterosexual sisters, and Rene Vivien, Natalie Clifford Barney, Rachilde, and Colette, among others, shared Delarue-Mardrus's fascination with the topic.This is the first translation into English of The Angel and the Perverts. In an astute introduction, Anna Livia rereads Lucie Delarue-Mardrus as a prolific and significant writer, despite the fact that previous scholars viewed her primarily as the wife of the scholar and translator Joseph-Charles Mardrus. Livia also places Delarue-Mardrus's life in a lesbian context for the first time and decodes this delightful novel so that readers will feel quite at home in Mario/Marion's unusual world, which runs the gamut from Auguste Rodin to Jean Cocteau and Sarah Bernhardt.

Genres: Queer, Fiction, LGBT, France, Lesbian, Historical, Transgender

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, née à Honfleur le 3 novembre 1874 et morte le 26 avril 1945 à Château-Gontier, poétesse, romancière, sculptrice et dessinatrice, journaliste et historienne française.
Ses parents ayant refusé la main de celle qu’on surnomme « Princesse Amande » au capitaine Philippe Pétain, elle épouse l’orientaliste Joseph-Charles Mardrus. Comme elle était intimement liée à Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks et Germaine de Castro, son mari dont elle divorcera vers 1915, qui désirait garder intacte la beauté de sa Princesse Amande, propose à Natalie Barney de lui faire un enfant à sa place. C'est à cette époque qu'elle emménage au 17 bis quai Voltaire à Paris, où elle vivra de 1915 à 1936.

Les écrits de cet auteur prolifique, qui a laissé plus de soixante-dix romans, recueils de poèmes (Ferveur, 1902 ; Horizons, 1904 ; la Figure de proue, 1908), récits (le Roman de six petites filles, 1909 ; l’Ex-voto, 1921), biographies, Mémoires (1938), contes, nouvelles, récits de voyage, pièces en vers (Thoborge, reine de mer, 1905) et pièces de théâtre (Sapho désespérée, 1906), révèlent une peintre de la vie intime et de la nature. Ses écrits expriment son désir d’évasion et son amour de sa Normandie natale. Son Ex-Voto est une description pleine de sensibilité du milieu et de la vie des pêcheurs honfleurais au début du XXe siècle. Elle est également l’auteur de chroniques hebdomadaires, critiques littéraires ou musicales, conférences aux Annales parues dans la presse. Dans les dernières années de sa vie, elle a présenté au Salon de la Société Nationale des sculptures dont Danseurs nus (figurine) Dame Patricia, son nègre et son galant (figurine) ou Deux danseuses et un indifférent. Elle exposa au Salon d'Hiver en 1936 un autoportrait .

Elle participe au championnat de France d'échecs féminin à Paris en 19271.

Elle vivra aussi à Honfleur au 44 rue des Capucins et passera les trois dernières années de sa vie à Château-Gontier où elle s’était retirée en 1942.

Reviews

[Suzanne Stroh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paris in the Twenties is the setting for this roman à clef that's really about the Belle Époque and its long legacy that nurtured Modernism. It is one of half a dozen works of fiction about the notorious saloniste Natalie Barney, and another reviewer has pointed out that you will get the most enjoyment out of this novel if you read it in conjunction with one of the others. To that list of well-known and highly searchable titles I would add the little-known French novel Un Soir chez L'Amazone, which paints an incredibly authentic portrait of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Natalie Barney in a room together.

From the viewpoint of an intersex narrator called Marion who lives as both a man and a woman, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus reports l'essentiel from the love affair with another woman that opened her eyes, flooded her senses, confirmed her lesbian identity, wrecked her marriage and changed her life forever. From beginning to end, it's a story about facing reality, about bravery and stubbornness in love. About being true to oneself, no matter what the price to pay, and never looking back.

The author waited ten years to declare publicly that Barney served as the model for Laurette Wells, the American heiress whose Left Bank lesbian exploits form the centerpiece of a story exploring French, upper class gay life in two post-war periods: the period following the Franco-Prussian war, into which the author and Barney were both born on the same day, October 31, and the period following World War I.

It was an era when gay and lesbian identity still went unspoken, although gay and lesbian love and sex among the urban middle classes was surging in popularity, while among the upper classes and the nobility it was enjoying something of a golden age. Unfortunately, we don't get any sex in this book, which is a shame. The first time Lucie and Natalie went to bed together, two or three days passed before they realized they had been making love nonstop. But Lucie's narrator in The Angel and the Perverts is not only sterile. S/he cannot register sexual desire. And as a result, there is something otherworldly and frightening about this character who is more Archangel than human. She attracts desire and love, and yet she cannot return them. It's troubling enough to balance out the glaring flaws of the "perverts," who seem tame and even pure by comparison. Chief among these is Laurette Wells, whose portrait Lucie paints in chilling detail. And yet through their actions (not to say their gestures or their speech), Wells and the other "perverts" prove endearing in the end.

This book fits into the canon of "sexology" literature made famous in 1928 when Radclyffe Hall's novel about a lesbian "invert" was banned in Britain and pulped, only to become a best seller across the channel in Paris. Virginia Woolf's Orlando was published the same year.

The cross-dressing lesbian invert thing is passé today, but back then, readers were fascinated by the idea that androgyny might hold a key to the mysteries of homosexuality. The habits, desires and tastes of masculine women and feminine men, in particular, were the subject of endless fascination by the chattering classes. Best selling authors like Colette, with her series of titillating, homoerotic "Claudine" novels, and Rachilde, with her saucy book on the Marquis de Sade, led the field in turning out lesbian erotica that readers just couldn't get enough of.

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was just as popular, publishing more than 70 books in her lifetime, but here she takes a more serious, and more scathing, line on the lesbian novel. The plot conflates her own shattered love affair with that of fellow-poet Renée Vivien, who ultimately committed suicide over unrequited love for Barney. Barney was so sensitive to this tragedy that she failed to see how Lucie also weaved two of Barney's other lovers into the plot: painter Romaine Brooks, who had secretly given up a baby for adoption, and author Djuna Barnes, whose abortion Barney financed.

The story rings so true that you can almost feel Barney touching your skin in bed while getting her nails done, breathing beside you in the car, having an arctic temper tantrum, changing the atmosphere with the arch of an eyebrow. Like Marion, you cannot help but be drawn into her ridiculous schemes to win back lost love from an "unworthy" successor, even though Laurette Wells admits she wants her beloved to suffer. You feel lit up by the burst of childlike sunshine in the smile of Renée Vivien, so incongruous with her "longing to be dead" (as one biographer, Diana Souhami, aptly summed up). You laugh at Lucie's spot-on criticisms and attacks of Barney, and you feel the lifelong love between them that their ill-fated passion never destroyed.

This is Anna Livia's finest translation. The book that takes you as close to Natalie Barney as you will ever get.

[Nicolas Lontel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tout d'abord, la préface est impeccable, clairement très académique, mais non seulement une excellente introduction à l'autrice, à la période, à éclairer les clefs du roman (et j'en avais clairement besoin, je dois avouer que je serais passé· à côté de tellement de chose sans cette préface), à donner des concepts théoriques (et à les expliquer!!!), etc. La préfacière connaît définitivement bien les périodes et ses protagonistes et arrive à nous communiquer cet intérêt. Bref, merci infiniment à son éditrice Nelly Sanchez pour cette préface et les nombreuses notes sur les changements entre les deux éditions du roman tout au long de l'ouvrage (même s'il s'agit de virgule). C'est exactement ce que j'aime voir dans ces éditions savantes et Sanchez réussit ce travail avec brio.

Pour ce qui est du roman lui-même, je dois être très honnête et mentionner avoir eu beaucoup de mal à le suivre. Je le trouvais plutôt inintéressant dans son intrigue et ses personnages (même s'il s'agissait de critiques de personnes réelles que je connais très bien) et celle la gender-fluidité du personnage central (hermaphrodisme dans le livre; je crois qu'on pourrait parler d'intersexuation aussi) et des conséquences du regard des un·es et des autres sur la/le protagoniste et les rôles qu'ille va jouer dans ses rôles est certainement une critique de l'essentialisation des femmes et de son cantonnement dans certains rôles et regards. Un livre qui livre peut-être même mieux, du moins de manière fictionnelle, le concept de l’altérité que Beauvoir introduira dans Le deuxième sexe I.

Pour moi, c'était de très bonnes idées, un très bon roman, une très bonne préface et édition, juste que le roman ne m'a pas particulièrement touché à mon grand regret.

(Il est aussi très cher, attention)

[hing · Rating 5 out of 5]

you feel the lesbianism and aesthetic catholicism reach out to you and caress you asking you to love it. the prose is beautiful in every which way. marion's gender tension under stress of destiny, assignment, agency, guilt is explored in a very complex, rich way, and her relationship to attraction and the intrinsic guilt involved under her physical condition regardless of her angelic, passive nature is very visceral. a very fashionable depiction of gender, attraction, and religion that touched me at my personal reconciliation with lesbianism, gender transition, and catholic upbringing, presented with prose that leaves me breathless. virgin mary metaphor i think was also one of the most stylish conceptual reconciliation and ending that you could get

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to read this because it was translated and introduced by Anna Livia (always a favorite), but also because one of the main characters is very obviously Natalie Barney. Icing on the cake: back cover blurb by the beloved Will Roscoe (this book came out in 1995, the year I took a class taught by Will, now that I think of it). The novel itself might get 3 stars from me, but my lifelong fascination with the literary lesbians of Paris makes this a wonderful new addition to my library, even if only for the introduction.

[Lord Beardsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very early work exploring gender fluidity with its main character as a hermaphrodite gay man/lesbian woman. Interesting, but not the most gripping of stories. Good to read on an anthropological level as an exploration of gender seen through the eyes of 1920s Paris. It's definately a good book to read along with Truly Wilde, and any biography of Natalie Barney or any work that describes Paris in the 1920s.

[Madelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The ambiguous silhouette of a figure with two faces can be seen prowling, but never participating, at various carnivals in modern dress: Julien Midalge’s studio, Laurette Wells’s villa, Ginette Lobre’s bear pit, one or two opium dens, certain cabarets, certain negro balls. The real bourgeoisie does not frequent these places, or rather what is left of the real bourgeoisie in a Paris heading more and more toward a confusion of the genders, a Paris in which the society of the post-war years1 is toppling the divisive barriers one after another, leaving only an undifferentiated, multicolored mob, whose numbers are increased by the surreptitious invasion of the foreigner, adding an extra intensity to the colors of this phrenetic Harlequinade.”

[au · Rating 3 out of 5]

not wholly interesting to me- i don’t know if it’s the translation or.. i would think for lucie mardrus to be a poet that it would have more poetic writing. then again i’ve been accustomed too much to poetic writing idk

“My hands twisted with pain. What was I to reproach others for their sexual fantasies, I who had no sex? A poor incompetent figure thrown into the turmoil of women and men. I was not permitted to judge their actions. All I could do was be jealous of their passions, I who could have none. . .” (148)

“Neither a Benedictine monk, nor a Benedictine nun. Both doors will close before me- as always.” (183)

[Meirav Rath · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's very poetically written, for sure, and it's a very short and easy book.
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I definitely recognized the stereotypes of such community nests and parties in large and liberal cities. I wonder how, almost 100 years apart from one another, the French 1920s Parisian one resembles the 2020s Tel Aviv one. Is it just something that happens due to the nature of what brings the community together, or just something that has become a culture and is passed on along the years.

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Court roman de 1934 sur une personne qu’on appelait alors hermaphrodite et sur le Paris lesbien de l’entre-deux-guerres.

Première phrase:

« Il a rêvé souvent que sa mère, ou plutôt la bête aveugle qui agit en nous indépendamment de notre esprit, a dû, lorsqu’elle le portait, préméditer des jumeaux, car, depuis l’âge où l’humain entre dans l’angoisse de l’âme, son instinct lui a fait sentir à ses côtés un mystérieux second lui-même. »

Le reste est à l’avenant.

[Fairywitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

היה מעניין לקרוא ספר ותיק כל כך שעוסק בגיבור/ה המפרודיט א-בינארי/ת ובנושא שאפילו היום לא כותבים עליו הרבה.
כספר קלאסי קצר הוא היה לא רע בכלל, אמיץ ומקורי.

לחובבי קלאסיקה שרואה אור מחדש.

[Elinor Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

gender identity and intersex issues during the turn of the century written by an open lesbian still hits hard 100 years later she just gets it

[rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly more touching than I expected it to be? Sort of reads like if Wes Anderson rewrote À Rebours to make Des Esseintes an intersex individual navigating interwar Paris... And Laurette Wells is possibly the funniest, fondest and most savage fictional portrayal I've read of Natalie Clifford Barney to date.