2—
Biography As History and Mystery:
Los Angeles and France, 1986–1996

Sabbaticals, leaves, summers, spring breaks, a stolen week here and there. Countless trips during these ten years to libraries and archives

This overall map of Mme du Coudray's teaching travels is divided into
three parts: 1760–1770, when she covered much of the center of France;
1770–1780, when she taught mostly in the periphery of the country; and
1780–1783, when she hoped to get the go-ahead to finish the areas she had
not yet "done." Because a number of cities in the south turned her away,
her exact whereabouts between mid-1771 and mid-1772 are unknown.

in the provinces of France, in Bourges, Caen, La Rochelle, Besançon, Périgueux, Tours, Bordeaux, Rennes, Châlons-sur-Marne, Nancy, Clermont, Rouen, Epinal, Poitiers, and on and on, piecing together bits of Mme du Coudray's works and days. Not a picture, but pictures; not a story, but stories take shape.

She was a bold pioneer in obstetrical pedagogy in the service of France, tirelessly promoting the interests of the government that dispatched her. She was a curse visited upon the traditional village matrons who practiced time-honored ways of birthing and wanted no "help" or instruction disrupting their lives. She was a female upstart usurping the turf of doctors and surgeons who had traditionally presided over all examinations and degree-granting ceremonies for midwives throughout the country. She was a wondrous, brilliant phenomenon. She was a virago. A loyal patriotic servant. A fraud not to be trusted. An ingenious inventor. An outrageous, pretentious quack. A self-sacrificing, devoted teacher. Feminist role model. Traitor to her sex. Savior of the French population. Mere flash in the pan. Boon to humanity. Royal (literally) nuisance. Any and all of the above, depending on your point of view.

I worked through roughly a thousand documents and letters in the official records concerning du Coudray's mission. Her contacts range from lofty—Turgot, Necker, Calonne, and other ministers of Kings Louis XV, Louis XVI, and the empress Maria Theresa—to lowly—obscure country matrons and parish priests—and these exchanges are preserved, along with a massive diffusion of correspondence between her and the royal provincial administrators. There are discussions of her in the letters of her medical contemporaries, references to her in almanacs of the day, petitions and certificates and contracts she signed. I found, in short, an overwhelming amount of material about her ambitious deeds in this paper trail.

What I did not find were any personal papers, anything introspective at all. No diary, no journal intime , no self-referential writings. In 1834 A. Delacoux, the author of a book on celebrated midwives, mentioned that he saw a collection of "numerous documents left by Mme du Coudray and gathered together by Mme Coutanceau," her niece.^[1] Delacoux dismisses these documents in a few offhand sentences, but his comments are enough to reveal that the collection included things that have never been preserved elsewhere and have not been seen since. Perhaps they showed a gentler, less guarded side of her, because Delacoux revised her portrait, divesting her of

her masterful frame and credentials, softening and rounding off her edges (fig. 2). Where is that packet of papers now, with its possible clues about du Coudray's interior life? I wrote to three hundred or so Coutanceaus presently living in France in the wild hope that, eight or nine generations later, some distant descendent might still be a keeper of this family flame. To no avail.

But of course, my inability to learn private details about du Coudray was not due entirely to the loss of these papers. It had at least as much to do with her conscious attempt to construct her own reputation, leaving out the personal, concealing her inner self. It is as if she made a bargain with herself to mute the feminine core of her being in exchange for appropriating the prerogatives of male behavior. She tailored, in other words, her own official story, which was one of stunning achievements. Another scholar might find this perfectly satisfying; yet it was only part of the story I wished to tell about her. Stubbornly perhaps, I was looking and listening for her , refusing to let her get lost within the neat narrative she offered to contain and hide life's chaos. She gave me her doings, but I also sought her feelings. So from the start, because this very public woman was so maddeningly private, we were in a struggle, she and I. This gave rise to several kinds of reflection: on the nature of the historian's craft in general, on the relationship between biographer and biographee, and on my particular subject, a woman who left behind a record at once so full and so spare.

For centuries history was written in an authoritative, detached voice, communicating an illusion of logical progression, objectivity, completeness. It claimed to have discovered "how things really were," to be scientific and factual, and to present a linear, seamless tale. Recently such empiricist presumptions of certainty in the discipline have been attacked; recovery of the past once and for all, the "whole story," now seems a naive and strange conceit. Feminist and post-modernist critics in particular have fought to turn old historical accounts on their ear, to "bring the margin to the center," to "problematize" age-old assumptions, to expose the futility and bankruptcy of searching for absolute answers. Such energetic challenges bring to the field tremendous new vitality and interest, but also considerable discomfort. If we acknowledge that our understanding is at best partial, that our views, far from being objective, are inescapably colored by the concerns of our present vantage point, that evidence itself is subjective, serendipitous, and fragmentary, that our

Figure 2.
This much-softened picture, made forty years after Mme du
Coudray's death and clearly based on the original in the textbook, flatters
her but deprives her of her imposing frame and credentials.

pictures of the past are incurably approximate and full of artifice, that they are constructed by us and not found or given ready-made, how then can we distinguish history from fable? How can we convince ourselves that our research leads to anything sound, trustworthy, or accurate?^[2] Hayden White has even questioned whether historians, as they assemble their stories, are doing anything fundamentally different than novelists.^[3] If there is no "disinterested site from which one can sit back and objectively make unbiased choices

and judgments,"^[4] what, if anything, can we ever really, responsibly know?

With biography, the history of a particular human being, these problems are only compounded. Here the evidence has often been tampered with by the historical subject herself, who may have destroyed some things deliberately, or who may have written an autobiography, a staging of the self, the reliability of which needs to be critically assessed.^[5] Biographers have been called "artists under oath," because they must exercise restraint and resist the temptation to invent.^[6] Yet such distance is hard to keep, because in life-writing two identities confront each other in an intense, reciprocal relationship. The biographer is unavoidably included in her work, an absent but strong presence. She determines what gets said about her subject; selects, omits, highlights; sets the sequence and pace; changes here and there the velocity of the narrative. But her subject is never the passive victim of such manipulations, for she too is controlling, resisting the inquiry here, cooperating there, a willful agent whose choices to reveal or withhold information ultimately color and shape the whole project. The point is that a "catalytic conjunction" occurs here; writer and subject are in this together, and the interaction is complicated. Explicitly acknowledging this negotiation is not perverse, and can yield surprises.^[7]

I realized I could make a virtue of necessity by using Mme du Coudray's case to illustrate these larger issues: the spotty, opaque, incomplete record that all historians have to work with, the tentativeness of answers, the impossibility of closure, and the opportunity for useful storytelling anyway. I want to show the process, not just the product, the recognition that many of the pieces are missing, that the puzzle will be full of holes. That is why this book is arranged by date-line entries, pulses of time, turning points, epiphanies, "liminal threshold" moments.^[8] My choice of an episodic rather than a smooth structure seems crucial, to suggest that what happened in between, the connective tissue of reasons and motives, is often unknowable. Historians always have to work with fragments and lacunae, with revelations and secrets. We may crave coherence and synthesis, but because much remains indecipherable we do not get it.

In Mme du Coudray's case the gaps are enormous and impossible to hide even if I wished to. Of the time before her fame she tells

us nothing. In her hundreds of letters there is never a single mention of her origins, parents, childhood, siblings, education, young adulthood, training, marriage if there was one, children if she had any, friends outside of her work. But for her death certificate, scribbled in Bordeaux in the midst of the Reign of Terror, which states that she was seventy-nine when she died in 1794 and a native of Paris, I wouldn't even know her place or date of birth. Clearly this biography could not follow the conventional cradle-to-grave pattern. Family cannot be the zero point of origin here, and it is extremely difficult to discover traces of this woman from the years before she, already in her mid-forties, burst into national prominence in 1760. Her teaching mission is then fairly well documented for the next quarter century. She fades from view again after retirement in the mid-1780s and the news of her darkens. How she filled her time in the last decade of her life is anybody's guess. For she is as unconfessional as they come, and I can scarce know the dancer from the dance.

Why does it matter? one could ask. What difference does it make? The story of her work suffices. We know little of Shakespeare's private life, after all, or Chaucer's, but there is still plenty to say about what they did. Du Coudray, too, did a great many noteworthy things. She was a woman with dazzling accomplishments to her credit who has been overlooked by historians. On the strength of that she should be a new star in the feminist work of retrieval and rescue of powerful (and therefore threatening) "foresisters," dubbed by Mary Daly in her invigorating wordplay "crone-ology," "hag-ography," "gyn/ecology."^[9] Certainly as a public servant and celebrity du Coudray was not at all shy. That story she clearly did want told. She always referred to her calling in grandiose terms—she was ensuring nothing less than the "good of humanity"—and to her midwifery book and obstetrical mannequins as "monuments to posterity for centuries to come." She wished to be remembered for her mastery.

Yet the fact that she was a woman with an interior life cannot be escaped, however much she downplayed it, so my challenge was to thicken the texture of her tale by keeping that fact in view. For gender, that "overarching category of human identity similar to race in its immutability and contestably more primary than class," is quite simply central to an understanding of any woman, even a woman who does not make an issue of it.^[10] Mme du Coudray defied the

normal pattern by making a mission, not a man, the focus of her being, having no home where I might discover her "inwardness" or "bridge her silences," never settling with a person in a place.^[11] Indeed, there seems to be an unbridgable chasm between her and others of her sex. This paradox of the singular, idiosyncratic woman who follows a "quest plot" instead of a "marriage plot" has been aptly summed up by Carolyn Heilbrun: "Exceptional women are the chief imprisoners of nonexceptional women, simultaneously proving that any woman could do it and assuring, in their uniqueness among men, that no other woman will." Du Coudray reached a level of achievement not commonly excusable in a female self.^[12] And yet she accepted for her approximately ten thousand students subordinate positions in the hierarchy of medical practitioners. Like Florence Nightingale, du Coudray did not seek stardom for her female disciples.^[13] Of course, there is something undeniably transgressive, if not truly subversive, about her mission, focused as it was on providing professional training to large numbers of women (she called them "my women"). They learned and laughed and struggled and cried together, bonded in unprecedented ways, got a sense of themselves as a valuable group, pictured new plotlines for their lives. Du Coudray didn't put it that way, of course. If her mission was to succeed, she could not engage in female advocacy; instead she must convey a sense of harmony with male practitioners and present herself as a loyal patriot.

Whatever she might have said, though, medical practice is a battleground, fiercely contested by the men entrenched in the profession, and she was a trespasser. It was my task, therefore, to develop the confidence to sometimes override her self-assessment, to interrogate rather than embrace her rosy picture. She wanted her version of the story accepted; I want it examined. I would explore just how the woman du Coudray composed her life, carved out her own special place in the world, formulated her agenda, negotiated herself into a position to do something great.^[14] What drove her to such creative efforts? What conditions did she have to accept? How did she adapt and adjust to changing political regimes and to the modernizing trends in Enlightenment medicine to advance her career? When did public and private intersect in her trajectory? Why in mid-life did she create a new script for herself? Where is what Virginia Woolf calls the "iridescence" of her personality, what Phyllis Rose

calls her "central spine"?^[15] By crafting and shaping the narrative in a way that leaves room for such inquiries and thus gives it meaning for me, I suppose I am committing "fiction" in Natalie Davis's sense of the term.^[16] But then I like to think that du Coudray would sympathize with some of these moves. She was herself a great creator of fictions, as we will see, playing with different names and identities, fashioning as she went along what real life failed to provide. So I should not settle for appearances, since things are seldom as they seem.

The subjects about which du Coudray said little held a special fascination for me. Eking out meaning from such reticence is hard, but then, when I agreed to work with her, she never promised it would be easy. For example, she disdained sightseeing. She focused in her numerous letters on the business she was doing, not on cathedrals or fountains, not on peasants pegging up their wash or drawing well-water, not on the weather. And she rarely spoke of the decades-long journey itself, whether bone-bruising or picturesque. Not for her the frivolous travelogues of the chatty. Yet the woman criss-crossed and saw the entire country! If we squeeze the letters for all they can possibly yield, we learn that she loved to eat—she traveled with a cook—and read—even the newspapers—and go to the theater and entertain—her rented houses were always outfitted with a service for large parties. One official commented: "It would surely be easier to quarter a company of cavalry than to furnish the lodgings for Mme du Coudray and her students"; another observed: "She demands a house fully equipped from cave to attic."^[17] Du Coudray, as her portrait shows, was no misanthrope. She had a strong sense of fun, and certainly did a lot of living in the many places she visited. I wanted to reconstruct some of that experience, even though she didn't help much.

So as I spent time in the archives of these places, I learned where she lived during her stay, I wandered in her neighborhood, I smelled the waxy church interiors where she took babies for baptism, I strolled along the rivers where water coaches sometimes carried her baggage, I ate regional specialties that she must have enjoyed, I explored numerous hôtels de ville (town halls) where she gave her lessons in the main hall. In Rouen I actually found one of her obstetrical mannequins, with all of its cloth parts and labels intact. This sole survivor, this last extant model, linked her to me very tangibly; she probably sewed those stitches herself. These are the things I could

see today that make hers what Henry James calls a "visitable past." The rest I had to imagine: her horsedrawn carriages on rutted dirt roads, the trumpet fanfare and noisy announcements by town criers of du Coudray's upcoming courses, the commotion of mobs of barefoot women hastening to town to hear her, the grave diggers scavenging bones to be used in the anatomical demonstrations, the relay watering posts along the routes where she and her horses took hurried refreshment during day stops, the moats and locked town gates, the extreme poverty of much of the countryside.

Du Coudray discovered or developed a taste for forging into the shadowy unknown to shed her light. She makes it all sound so purposeful, so directed, because all this activity was heading her toward something she had pledged to accomplish. But I could not help thinking that her strenuous exertions were also moving her away from something else. Was the fierce ambition for public success a kind of compensatory flight from some private failure? For what reason did she place herself safely beyond the risks of intimacy, into a life where competence and achievement took its place?

From the first it struck me as the ultimate irony that this national midwife was herself childless. The only heirs she had were ones she created late in life by adoption. Without this maneuver she would have left no progeny, appearing a pathetic figure in a culture that so valued fertility. Was her avoidance of what Adrienne Rich calls "pairing and bearing" the stimulus for her boundless commitment, indeed her passion, to save babies for her patrie?^[18] Having shunned, by choice or necessity, the traditional role of childbearer and mother, was she driven to transcend from the personal to the patriotic arena, to make her work fruitful though her body had not been, to propagate both the bien de l'humanité and the biens of the French state, to literally deliver the good(s), to make human life on a grand scale her very business?