“Cases of Identity: La femme sans nom,
The Woman in White, and the Tichborne Claimant.”
This paper is the fifteen
minute version of a book I now have in the works. It’s about a legal case in France that became a novel in England,
a novel that generated a whole new genre of fiction, and with it a new form of
social anxiety, and it’s finally about
a second legal case that came along to exploit that anxiety. It is more
generally about the way real life mysteries get into literature and what
happens to them when they do, and about the cultural transformations that can
occur when one society starts telling stories that originated elsewhere. The French legal case concerned the marquise
de Douhault, also known as la femme sans nom, the novel was The Woman
in White, and the second, British, legal case was that of the Tichborne
Claimant.
Just after Christmas of 1787,
Adelaide-Marie de Champignelles, widow of the marquis de Douhault, the
chateleine of an estate in the Berry, set out for Paris. It was not a journey she was looking forward
to, for she was planning to have it out with her older brother, the comte de
Champignelles. On the death of their
father, he had come into the title, and had persuaded their mother that to keep
up his position at court he needed more income than would be left after paying
her viagère, or widow’s pension.
She had agreed to live on a considerably smaller annuity, but the son
had been stingy and slow about paying even that, so that she had been forced to
sell some of her jewelry -- to sublet part of her apartment in the Rue de Bac –
just to keep up her minuscule establishment.
And now, it seemed, he was talking about putting the family chateau and
estate on the market. The mother was
beside herself with rage and fear, and her hysterical letters persuaded her 46
year old daughter, recently widowed herself,
to set out for Paris in the dead of winter.
Passing through Orleans, the
marquise spent a few days with some cousins of her late husband’s, who had
inherited most of his properties aside from her own viagère. On January 15th, during a drive
along the banks of the Loire, she was suddenly taken ill. After she returned to her room, she fell
into a deep sleep, with glassy eyes and shallow breathing, a lethargy from
which the physicians who were called in could not awaken her. Two days later, on the 17th of
January 1788, towards midnight, a servant belonging to the Orleans household
who had been set as a deathwatch pronounced that her life was over, and, after
the customary legal formalities, she was buried in a common grave at Orleans on
January 21st. By June of
1788, what remained of her property had been distributed to her surviving
relatives. Her brother got what had
belonged to her personally and what belonged to her as the dowager marquise
went to her late husband’s kin.
Now maybe I should have said
that someone or something was buried at Orleans. For about eighteen months later, at the end of the spring of
1789, a woman imprisoned in the Salle de Saint Claire of the Salpêtrière – a
munitions factory that had Louis XIV had transformed into an almshouse, and
which was now being used as a women’s prison -- smuggled out a letter to the
duchesse de Polignac (the favourite of Marie-Antoinette). The writer claimed that she was the marquise
de Douhault, and that she had almost lost her reason and her hopes. She had been taken ill, had been drugged,
brought by coach to Paris, and there arrested by means of a lettre de cachet and put into
prison. Gabrielle de Polignac sent some
gentlemen to interview the prisoner, who must have presented convincing
evidence of her friendship with the duchesse, because a week later, in early
July 1789, she was released.
The marquise, if it was indeed
the marquise, was to spend the rest of a very long life attempting to recover
her name, her rank and her place in society, while her brother, for his part,
spent the rest of his life insisting she was an imposter, not even a
gentlewoman much less his sister. Had
the ancien regime continued for another six months, the case of the marquise
might perhaps have been settled one way or the other by royal fiat. But a few days after the release of the
marquise, the Bastille was stormed, and not long after that, on October 5-6,
1789, the fishwives of Paris marched on Versailles, the court dispersed, the
duchesse de Polignac emigrated, and the royal family began life in the
Tuileries, the first of their prisons.
It was not until 1792 that the
soi-disante marquise was able to bring an action to recover her property at a
tribunal in Saint-Fargeau. The court
interviewed her and she collected affidavits from hundreds of residents of
Yonne and the Berry recognizing her as the daughter of the late count. But the court at Saint-Fargeau was reluctant
to question the death and burial certificates issued by respectable doctors and
administrative officials in Orleans.
Without examining the marquise’s affidavits, it decided to accept
instead the theory of the comte de Champignelles that the claimant was not his
sister the marquise but rather a known grifter and charlatan named Anne Buiret
who had spent the years from 1786 to 1789 in the Salpetriere.
The marquise continued her
struggle but found that wealthy defendants can easily manufacture legal
delays. Twelve years were to pass,
years of revolution, chaos and war, before the marquise was able to get her
brother and her husband’s cousins into a courtroom, and this time it was a
criminal court at Bourges. This time in 1804 there was a full hearing, a parade
of identification witnesses and a stream of affidavits on both sides. Servants and former tenants of the marquise
testified that they recognized her; cousins of the marquise testified they did
not. The former husband of Anne Buiret
testified with relief that the claimant was not his wife, did not resemble her
in the least. And Francoise Périsse,
the marquise’s chambermaid, who had been her mistress’s only companion on the
ill-fated journey to Orleans, deposed that her mistress had surely died, for
she had been buried in Orleans, but somehow, she did not know how, the claimant
was certainly beyond all doubt her mistress the marquise de Douhault.
The court heard mountains of
evidence on both sides, sometimes completely contradictory. Two attendants from La Salpetriere, Eulalie
Pithou and Marie Langlois, signed an affidavit to the effect that the claimant
had entered the prison in 1788 and had told them, from the time she woke up,
that she was the Widow Douhault. The
attendants then contradicted this testimony in open court, claiming that they
had signed after being treated to a grand dinner with old wines and had no idea
what they were signing. In rebuttal,
the notary who had taken their testimony swore that the testimony had been
taken in the morning, not after dinner, that it had been read back to them, and
that when they signed they had been cold sober. Clearly witnesses had been bought, but which and when and by
whom?
Meanwhile, to influence public
opinion, the comte de Champignelles paid a hack playwright named Dubois to
write and produce a comedy called La Fausse Marquise, about a female
charlatan who, with the help of a dishonest steward, takes over an entire
estate, till quarreling between the rogues brings them down. The comedy was shown at the Theatre St
Martin in Paris and at two provincial venues near Bourges.
The 1804 verdict at Bourges
was about as ambiguous as a verdict could be.
It was judged that the marquise had not met her burden of proof, so the
comte de Champignelles and the other defendants were acquitted of all
charges. But the imperial procurator
who had attended the trial refused to prosecute the marquise for fraudulent
impersonation. The judgment of the court
of Saint-Fargeau was reaffirmed except for its ruling that the claimant was
Anne Buiret. The court at Bourges
agreed that the claimant was not Anne Buiret and could not use her name, but on
the other hand neither was she entitled to use the name of the marquise de
Douhault. When she asked the court what
name she could use, the court in effect shrugged its shoulders.
Her court battle, notorious at
the time, was known as that of "la
femme sans nom" because the courts had in effect declared her to be
nameless. The story of the case is rich
in the sorts of ironies that anyone who has ever been involved with the law
will appreciate, and it was not over in 1804: it continued to reverberate in
appeals and pleadings until the claimant died at an advanced age in 1832—and
even after her death when the question came up under what name to bury
her. It is a delicious real life
mystery that has never received popular attention in England or America,
although fictionalized versions of it seem to appear in France on the average
of once every fifty years. It is a
mystery that has never been decided, either.
While most historians who have written at length on the marquise have
concluded that she was indeed who she claimed to be, most of the lawyers who
have treated the case have agreed with the courts that she was an
imposter. Meanwhile the little town of
Champignelles, on its official website, refers to the “affaire retentissante de
la pseudo-marquise de Douhault, qui prétendait recueillir les biens de la
famille de Champignelles, sous la Révolution.”
But one of the people who read
the story about la femme sans nom was
the novelist Wilkie Collins. Visiting
Paris in 1856 together with Dickens, Collins had picked up at a quaiside
bookstall what he called “a French Newgate Calendar.” It was volume III of Maurice de Méjan's Receuil des causes célèbres, containing one part of the history of
the marquise (who was appealing her case to the Cour de la Cassassion, the
French equivalent of the Supreme Court, when Méjan wrote her up in 1808). Something about the case stirred Collins's
creative juices, and he began working on what became his most popular work,
then and now, The Woman in White.
Apart from giving the story a
happy ending, Collins had to make changes because of the differences between
the French and English judicial systems.
So in Collins's novel, Laura, Lady Glyde, the heiress who disappears and
has someone else buried in her tomb, is immured in a private madhouse instead
of a prison. This change may have
originated in the fact that by the time Collins read the story, the Salpêtrière
was no longer being used as a women’s prison and had become a humane mental
hospital, under the direction of Phillipe Pinel. But it also had to do with current events.
In July and August of 1858
there was a "feeding frenzy" in the London daily newspapers detailing
at least six high-profile cases of respectable men and women who had been
incarcerated in private lunatic asylums at the behest of covetous
relatives. The most noteworthy of the
victims was the wife of the novelist and parliamentarian Edward
Bulwer-Lytton. Another involved an
escapee from a private madhouse who put himself in the hands of muckraking
novelist Charles Reade, who proceeded to take the man to noted physicians who
testified that the man was undoubtedly sane.
This journalistic episode is
not particularly well known today because the one British newspaper that is
properly indexed for researchers--the Times
of London--was skeptical
about the story and published leaders arguing that there was really no story
worth telling. Now these days, when a
newspaper takes the attitude that a story has been overblown, it usually means
that the paper has been scooped and is behind the curve on getting that
story. I suspect that was what it meant
in 1858 as well. In any case, private
madhouses soon became the object of a Parliamentary Commission, so that
Collins's novel fed into what was then an intense popular interest in how
easily inconvenient relatives could be disposed of inside private
madhouses.
The Woman in White was not only a tremendous popular success, it
initiated a significant change in the culture of the English-speaking
world. The issue Collins had raised
with the plight of Laura Glyde--the possibility that one's identity could be lost
or stolen, that one could find oneself struggling in vain to establish one's
identity--was one that had not had very much resonance in England or America
before the 1859-60 publication of The
Woman in White. Personal identity
was then a French issue. France was the
country of Martin Guerre, and the story of how Arnaud du Tilh had successfully
masqueraded as Martin Guerre till the real Martin Guerre turned up had been a
part of both popular and high culture there, ever since Jean Coras wrote up the
case in 1561. This story was retold by
Francois de Belleforest and Michel de Montaigne, and later by countless
others. And there were many other
popular French stories of imposters of this sort, like Pierre Mège who in the
seventeenth century had masqueraded as Isaac de Castellane de Caille. And there had been other stories about
people who had been believed dead and had subsequently found it hard to
re-establish their existence, such as Louis de Pivardière. By the nineteenth-century France was
circulating dozens of such stories about identity lost or identity stolen, some
factual, some fictional. (In the
mid-nineteenth century alone, Balzac had written Le Colonel Chabert, Hugo and Dumas fils both began writing plays
based on Martin Guerre, while Dumas père had written The Man in the Iron Mask.)
But England was virgin
territory for the theme. There had been
notorious English imposters—such as Mary Carleton, who claimed to be a German
princess in the 1660s, such as George Psalmanazaar, who had claimed early in
the eighteenth century to be a nobleman from the isle of Formosa, and Mary
Wilcox, who a century later had claimed to be Princess Caraboo of Javasu. But these were imposters of a different
sort. While they were pretending to be
something they were not, they were not usurping the identity of another actual
person, living or dead.
But the time must have been
ripe for identity-anxiety. Collins's Woman in White was like a tiny crystal
dropped into a supersaturated solution, almost instantly creating more and more
crystals. The "sensation
novel" -- a genre that took England by storm in the 1860s -- was about
domestic crime, usually with mysteries hinging on a central mystery about
personal identity. Mary Elizabeth
Braddon was to write Lady Audley's
Secret, about a beautiful woman who after a failed marriage adopts a new
identity and is driven to murder by the past she cannot quite obliterate. Ellen Price Wood took a more sentimental
take: her most famous heroine was an adulterous wife who takes on a new
identity as a governess (after a railway accident completely alters her
appearance) and returns to her ex-husband's house where she helps her successor
to raise her own children. The novel
was East Lynne -- not much read these
days, but the classic four-handkerchief weeper. Charles Dickens used the theme himself in his last novels, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood, and Collins himself was to
return to it in Armadale and The New Magdalen. (The 1860s was also to see the first
stirring of British journalism on imposters, including one of the first
re-tellings in English of the Martin Guerre case and the first factual
reportage on the marquise de Douhault, la femme sans nom.)
But if art had imitated life
in The Woman in White, by the end of
the decade, life had begun to imitate art again. Late in 1866 a man who had been a butcher in Wagga Wagga,
Australia, calling himself Tomas Castro,
arrived in England claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the dissolute heir
to a British baronetcy who had set sail from Rio de Janeiro in 1854 on a ship that
had gone down with all hands. The
claimant’s story was that he had been picked up by another ship, had been a
castaway again in the Pacific, but was picked up once more and deposited in
Australia. There he had bummed around
the outback for a few years, after which he had married and settled down to a
manual trade. He had forgotten all
about his former life in England till a chance advertisement caught the
attention of a friend.
The Tichborne Claimant (as he
was known) traveled to France early in 1867 where Roger's mother -- who had
placed the advertisements, who had never given up hope that her son would
reappear -- was said to have recognized him before her death that same
year. The rest of the family, however,
or all but one of them, was certain that the Claimant was an impostor. His tale of having seduced his fiancee
prior to leaving for South America was surely the act of a cad and a
bounder. Such a man could never have
been educated as a gentleman, and could surely not be Sir Roger Tichborne.
The question had to be tried
in the courts, which up until then had never seriously considered the question
of how someone establishes his or her personal identity. And because of the way
the British public had been primed by the vogue of the Sensation Novel all
through the 1860s, what was merely a
civil lawsuit to recover property got the sort of attention that previously had
been the monopoly of the murder trials of monsters like the poisoner William
Palmer. Actually there were two trials,
the first civil, the second criminal.
They were the equivalent of the OJ Simpson trials of the era, in the
sense that they split England cleanly along class lines the way the Simpson
trials split the United States along racial lines. The propertied classes were convinced that the Claimant was a
rogue and a liar. The working classes were convinced that he was a man who had
seen hardship but found love and inner peace as a working man in the colonies,
and now was now being done out of his rights by wealthy relatives who did not
want to claim kinship with someone who had been a butcher, of all things, in
Australia, of all places.
At the conclusion of the
second trial in 1874 the Claimant was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to
fourteen years at hard labor. He died
in poverty in 1898. While most
historians are now convinced that the Claimant was born Arthur Orton, in the
East London borough of Wapping, the most recent chronicler of the case, Douglas
Woodruff, is not convinced that he was a fraud and challenges those who think
he was to explain how he could have known so much about Roger Tichborne's early
life.
As one might expect in any cause
celebre, Art began to imitate Life all over again, as interest in the
Tichborne case generated new fictions about cases of identity and long-lost
heirs. Contemporary novelists like
Anthony Trollope took up the class issues coming out of the Tichborne case in
stories like “The Spotted Dog” and novels like Is He Popenjoy? And it was not just the Brits who were
influenced: Mark Twain, who was in England at the time, was fascinated by the
trials and subsequently wrote both The
Prince and the Pauper and Pudd'nhead
Wilson on the themes of mixed-up identity, as well as a less well-known
novel called The American Claimant.
Meanwhile the real life issues
continued, as the question of evidence for identity became an urgent one for
the British legal system. The barrister
Aubrey Moriarty began the serious discussion of identification and the problems
of legal evidence, while Francis Herbert Piercy proposed that photographs of
individuals be kept on file for later comparison. Thus the case of the Claimant stimulated interest in physical
methods of identifying individuals, particularly criminals, and advanced the
cause of anthropometrical systems such as that of Phillipe Berthillon, whose
final theory—that individuals might be identified by the unique shape of their
ears—seems to have led directly to the use of fingerprints. Today, of course, we have DNA analysis,
which would have enabled the soi-disante marquise de Douhault to
establish her kinship with her brother in a few weeks.
But the anxiety of identity
has continued, accelerated by our sense of dissolution into the mass society we
inhabit, the mail we received addressed to OCCUPANT, the telephone calls we get from people who have randomly dialed
our number in order to sell us a different long-distance service, the
friendships we form in chat rooms and listservs on the internet with people who
know us only from the bytes of data we send them. The Woman in White has not gone out of style, but as we
see from recent films like The Net, our arenas of virtual reality like
the World Wide Web have given rise only to new anxieties about identity.
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<<Possible issue for
further discussion:
Jonathan Loesberg in a
well-known article in Representations argues that the Sensation Novel is
about anxiety over identity, but shifts the issue into anxiety over class
identity in the decade before the second Reform Bill. I may be too literalminded here but I think Loesberg has found
the wrong social text. Anxiety over class
identity had informed the English novel ever since Pamela and Joseph
Andrews. The Sensation Novel often
raises issues of class identity as well—and keeps those areas distinct—see esp.
Our Mutual Friend and Lady Audley’s Secret. Conjecture: one reason for the fascination
with anxiety over personal identity in the 1860s may have had to do with
the beginnings in England of something like a mass society. Ultimately modernist texts would soothe this
anxiety by redefining personal identity in psychological terms, though the
anxiety would continue, as is evident, into our own day.>>