“I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris.”
Mata Hari, a Pygmalion, and the Amazons
Amazons of Paris is a newsletter researched and written by me, Susanna Forrest, as I work on a book of the same name. The Amazons were circus equestriennes in nineteenth-century Europe, from the famous to the forgotten. You can get a sense of their lives and world from my introductory post, which you also receive if you subscribe. We’re here to puzzle out lost women of the past and try to understand their lives.
Mata Hari
I read recently that Mata Hari became a circus horsewoman in Paris during her erratic trajectory from Dutch colonial housewife to executed spy. Margaretha MacLeod (née Zelle) had fled to the city in 1903 to escape an abusive home, later telling a journalist, “I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris.” I was intrigued to find such a famous Amazon, but as I Googled different sources looking for a simple answer, it became unclear if Mata Hari had ever actually ridden a horse in a Paris circus ring at all. I did feel that there was a connection to tease out between her and the world of the Amazons, and then the RetroNews newsletter reported that last Sunday was the 106th anniversary of her execution by firing squad at an army barracks in Vincennes. It was clearly time to dedicate an issue of Amazons of Paris to her.
Where to start? With RetroNews, of course. How does Margaretha hatch fully into Mata? There’s a mention of her dancing without a horse in Ernest Molier’s rue Benouville circus in June 1905, but by then her “hindou dances” were already an established sensation. The earliest record of her performing the dances in Paris is not in the circus, but months earlier, at a gala dinner in February 1905, and Molier is named as the matchmaker who recommended her to the gala’s hostess.
In August 1905, when newspaper columns were filled with raves about her “exotic” looks and “sacred dances”, “Strozzi” trotted out a little back story in Gil Blas, writing that on arrival in Paris “the ultimate melting pot of cosmopolitan avatars … she was a painter; she was a model; having enjoyed the noble sports as a child, she thought of becoming a horsewoman. But one day at Molier’s she danced, and her vocation was revealed.”
She was by no means the first dancer to perform at Molier’s circus, so I have to wonder if Strozzi was wrong and she never even tried to be an equestrienne. I certainly couldn’t find any mention of her working as a horsewoman in that circus or any other, although of course, that doesn’t mean she didn’t, and she had connected with Molier by then. I would need to find all the old programmes for his circus, and I would love to do so because the few I can find online are absolutely beautiful.
But why would she fetch up at Molier’s circus in the first place, and why would people assume she must have been an Amazon if she performed there? Who was Molier and what was so distinctive about his circus? Why did it launch her into her true Paris career, her celebrity, and her notoriety?
No circus is “usual” but Ernest Molier’s establishment was an exception to exceptions. Molier was not circus born. He sprang from another kind of dynasty – wealthy French provincial bourgeoisie. A “sportsman” and horseman in thrall, like so many of his brothers, to the Paris circus, he simply founded his own at his house in the rue Benouville near the Bois de Boulogne.* He later wrote, “damning the fate that made me be born into a bourgeois family … (I) … would have preferred to spring from a big drum and have been nursed by one of those vigorous women who jump through paper-covered hoops while making energetic hop-hops.”**
Cirque Molier was an intimate wooden arena with room for just 400 spectators, and from its very beginnings in 1880 it catered exclusively to an elite, invitation-only clientele of Tout-Paris and its demimonde. Molier organised separate nightly performances to which a man might bring his mistress and his wife. At a time when equestrianism was beginning a fall from favour in European circuses, he ran a defiantly horsey programme in which haute-école was the centrepiece. It was successful (or else well subsidised by Molier) and still going strong at his death in 1933, at which point it was shuttered.
The aristocrats and upper classes not only sat in the audience – they also gyrated in the ring, performing alongside circus professionals. Most of these amateur turns were male, like the Comte de la Rochefoucauld (on the trapeze) or the Baron de Bizy (on horseback), although I turned up photos and programme notes for another dancing female aristocrat and an intriguing “Comtesse X”, who rode haute-école there and surely deserves a newsletter of her own at some point.
In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil writes about the rue Benouville circus’ controversial status at a time when France, defeated in the Franco-Prussian war, was seeking to understand its supposed degeneration and unmanning and look to a new kind of physical aristocracy. True circus people had long been admired for their physiques and skills and even viewed as a more worthy aristocracy by some commentators. But what Molier’s 50th anniversary programme calls “la Rénaissance Athlétique” alarmed the press and bourgeoisie when it involved actual aristocrats making physical spectacles of themselves not on the fencing piste or hunting field, but in a coconut-matted ring.
Weil quotes a letter to La Tribune whose author fretted about dukes or counts doing circus tricks: “Here are the supports of the throne and the altar! Here they are! … The sympathizers of Orléans [ie the pro-monarchists] are on the assault of our institutions with a troupe of entitled clowns!”
And what about the women, who are, of course, the real subjects of this newsletter? Cirque Molier functioned as a kind of accelerated pipeline for equestriennes of all stripes, with Molier as the presiding Svengali. While the circus proper grew most of its own stars from birth, Molier – like Franconi in the early days of the Hippodrome – took courtesans, dancers, actresses, and other women on the margins and gave them an intensive introduction to horsewomanship that included riding astride, vaulting, and acrobatics on the horse’s backs. He claimed to be responsible for bringing about the end of the sidesaddle, and often his haute-école horsewomen appeared en travestie.
Noiriel, who wrote a recent biography of the great clown Chocolat, gives Molier’s training routine a salacious edge: “They work on their rump movements, taking care to ‘chase their seat from back to front’. The old sportsmen particularly appreciate the ‘equestriennes who sought the bottom of the saddle’, according to a time-honoured expression.” I have been searching for a source in my notes that said they trained after dark in the Bois de Boulogne – or did I make up that detail because it seemed fitting?
Molier was the route through which the courtesan Blanche de Marcigny crossed over into being a public performer and eventually an Olympic participant. Suzanne Valadon’s unreliable memoirs claim she was a horsewoman there. Alice Lavigne, a horsey actress about whom I wrote in an earlier newsletter, turns out to have performed at Molier’s circus too. His greatest female star was Blanche Allart, who began working for the Franconis, met Molier when barely into her teens, and married her much-older Pygmalion in 1918.
Blanche Allarty-Molier, as she became, is the woman you have seen sitting out a tense capriole on her Anglo-arab Dartagnan in this image. She vaulted, danced on horseback, tamed liberty horses, and triumphed in snappy haute-école routines dominated by impressive airs above ground. She also performed her own inventions – such as the hard-to-picture “trapeze on horseback” – and cabrades (vertical rears) on a camel. In Cirque Molier 1880-1904, Molier writes that she always had a retroussé nose until one day she was pitched off a horse face first into the third row of the audience, breaking her nose and thus achieving a more “aristocratic” profile. Il faut souffrir pour être belle.
I have a feeling that Molier helped to demystify the circus and the Amazon in a period when both began to decline in popularity. That’s not to say that he did not train talented women, but his circus was grafted onto the real tradition and the real families who created circus. He celebrated it while drawing it closer to the demimonde and upper classes – neither of which were traditionally part of its fabric or associated with hard work. For all his longing to be suckled by an écuyère, he was not born on the road, his livelihood dependent on luck and skill. Circus was his life, but also an indulgence rather than a vocation. Henry Higgins never truly risks his skin.
Strozzi considered Paris a “melting pot of cosmopolitan avatars”, but I think there’s a case for Molier’s circus itself as the crucible for a heady and very specific blend of physical culture, orientalism, eroticism, and appropriation. If the runaway Margaretha Macleod needed money, men, and fame, then the rue Benouville channeled all three into this charged space, and from it, Mata Hari took her most powerful form.
* Molier’s circus has long since been demolished and replaced with a modern building at 6-8 rue Benouville.
** Quoted from Kari Weil’s Precarious Partners.
I consulted the biographies Femme Fatale, Loves Lies and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari by Pat Shipman (2011) and A Tangled Web: Mata Hari: Dancer, Courtesan, Spy by Mary W Craig (2017).