Chapter 6

BIOGRAPHY OF CAMILLE MAUPIN

The town of Guerande, which for two months past had seen Calyste, its
flower and pride, going, morning or evening, often morning and
evening, to Les Touches, concluded that Mademoiselle Felicite des
Touches was passionately in love with the beautiful youth, and that
she practised upon him all kinds of sorceries. More than one young
girl and wife asked herself by what right an old woman exercised so
absolute an empire over that angel. When Calyste passed along the
Grand Rue to the Croisic gate many a regretful eye was fastened on
him.

It now became necessary to explain the rumors which hovered about the
person whom Calyste was on his way to see. These rumors, swelled by
Breton gossip, envenomed by public ignorance, had reached the rector.
The receiver of taxes, the /juge de paix/, the head of the
Saint-Nazaire custom-house and other lettered persons had not reassured
the abbe by relating to him the strange and fantastic life of the
female writer who concealed herself under the masculine name of Camille
Maupin. She did not as yet eat little children, nor kill her slaves
like Cleopatra, nor throw men into the river as the heroine of the
Tour de Nesle was falsely accused of doing; but to the Abbe Grimont
this monstrous creature, a cross between a siren and an atheist, was
an immoral combination of woman and philosopher who violated every
social law invented to restrain or utilize the infirmities of
womankind.

Just as Clara Gazul is the female pseudonym of a distinguished male
writer, George Sand the masculine pseudonym of a woman of genius, so
Camille Maupin was the mask behind which was long hidden a charming
young woman, very well-born, a Breton, named Felicite des Touches, the
person who was now causing such lively anxiety to the Baronne du
Guenic and the excellent rector of Guerande. The Breton des Touches
family has no connection with the family of the same name in Touraine,
to which belongs the ambassador of the Regent, even more famous to-day
for his writings than for his diplomatic talents.

Camille Maupin, one of the few celebrated women of the nineteenth
century, was long supposed to be a man, on account of the virility of
her first writings. All the world now knows the two volumes of plays,
not intended for representation on the stage, written after the manner
of Shakespeare or Lopez de Vega, published in 1822, which made a sort
of literary revolution when the great question of the classics and the
romanticists palpitated on all sides,--in the newspapers, at the
clubs, at the Academy, everywhere. Since then, Camille Maupin has
written several plays and a novel, which have not belied the success
obtained by her first publication--now, perhaps,