2023-06-20 11:16:00
“Proud of Letters” Time.news dossierEach month, the National Library of France highlights a work by an unknown writer, which can be downloaded free of charge from Gallica. Today, the cheeky writer and her Montmartre heroine with free morals.
Jeanne Landre belonged to the world of artists and writers. Close to Bruant, Steinlein, Carco or Mac Orlan, she became a successful novelist by inventing the character of Shallot, the type of sassy and modern young woman from “la Butte”.
Daughter of a soldier, Jeanne Landre was born on December 29, 1874 in Paris. She belongs to a generation of women who seek their independence. She chose to work in the press and began her career under the aegis of the magazine Propos de Jean-Francois Louis Merlet(1878-1942), Jeanne Landre then wrote for the feminist journal the Frond by Marguerite Durand and achieved a certain notoriety there. At the same time, she opened up to an activity as a prose writer and art critic. She finds in her district of Montmartre all her “documentation”… Friend of the polemicist Laurent Tailhade (1854-1919) and Jehan-Rictus (Gabriel Randon dit, 1867-1933), the author of Soliloques du Pauvre (1903), she is renowned for her very free morals – which the poet does not hesitate to record in his diary. It was these bohemian years that she put to good use with the help of an innovative publisher, Louis Michaud, with whom she became a collaborator.
A readership curious about liberated morals
Under his surname, Louis Michaud forged an essential brand of the years 1910-1920. He also had the intuition of the illustrated book cover with the help of the poster artist Geo Dorival (1879-1968). He found in Jeanne Landre the novelist who provided him with bestsellers with a character of a piquant young woman that she created from scratch, or almost, as we will discover in 1937…
On the occasion of a performance of Shallot staged in a small Montmartre theater, the journalist Max Descaves had a curious encounter. Jeanne Landre had just disappeared on November 17, 1936 and an old lady whose name has remained unknown attended the performance. Asked by Paris-Midi, she swore that the portrait was far from being faithful, “yet it is all my youth that Jeanne’s novel evokes… I was barely twenty years old when, around 1901, I met her in a restaurant in rue Lepic where she and I often took our lunches. Right away, she was a friend to me. Her cultured mind impressed the little theater maker […] ah!… Sir, those were happy times. [Jeanne] could have done me a lot of harm, if my husband had read the novel… Fortunately, the poor man died in 1927, without having heard of it”.
A little different perhaps from the Claudine of Colette and Willy, the Shallot of Jeanne Landre conquers the hearts and a consequent readership curious about the liberated morals of a time which did not wait for May 68 to live sexuality freely. It was, first of all, in 1909, the scandalous Shallot and its lovers – which also dares a rare but unmistakable typo on the title page – then, the following year Shallot continuesand finally, since time passes for everyone, even the heroines, Dowager Shallot.
The salty mores of youth are the delight of the good bourgeois, and these novels which bear witness to the limitless joys of the Butte Montmartre attract attention, especially since the slang with which Jeanne sprinkles her writings adds a little rascal air to them… As a professional of the written thing, the novelist will multiply the successes with some others characters.
sarcastic mind
A nurse during the First World War, Jeanne Landre was also a woman of combat, as evidenced by her contributions to the founding of the League of Women in the Liberal Professions, to charities or to the Society of Men of Letters. Despite her marriage to the painter Robert Saldo (1887-1950), her reputation remained: in a 1923 survey of French literature (1), she was always presented as “the novelist of Montmartre”, “the modern disciple of a Murger , even more bohemian” than his master. Basically, it clearly contributes to enriching the themes of love, sexuality, but also feminism, since the expression of the freedom of Shallot is part of the firm claim for the rights of all.
Offering subtle psychological analyzes despite the blatant humor of her prose, Jeanne Landre, who brings tender overtones to her most bawdy features, has great talent. His first book, Gargouille had been launched as follows by his publisher: “These are the loves of an old and ugly woman for a young unscrupulous rasta. The author uses this pretext to put forward cruel theories on the enemy-born sex of his own: which, however, in no way hinders his judgment on the moral hysteria of women, undressed with amusing rudeness by one of their congeners” (Louis Michaud, 1906).
His sometimes sarcastic wit reminded many of his friend Aristide Bruant. Close to the latter and friend of the painter Steinlein, she left beautiful portraits of them in the monographs she devoted to them (2), proof, if necessary, that Jeanne Landre had heart and mind.
(1) French Literature During the Last Half-Century, MacMillan.
(2) Aristide Bruant, the New Publishing Company, 1930.
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