Les indomptables

Francesco Rapazzini

Publié par Edite, le 07 juillet 2013

Résumé

Portraits of six forgotten eccentrics, writers and painters living in Paris who shaped the Modern era. Until now their lives went noticed but unrecorded. Francesco Rapazzini ransacks diaries, letters and unpublished manuscripts to flesh out these extraordinary lives. Danish painter Gerda Wegener (1885-1940) was married to the first Western man, painter Einar Wegener (1882-1931), to undergo a sex change. Afterwards, they lived together as lesbians. The Paul-Margueritte sisters, Eve and Lucie, born a year apart in the mid 1880s, wrote obsessively and lived inseparably until Lucie's death in 1955, when Eve was forced to outlive her alter-ego for another decade and a half. Painter Michel-Marie Poulain (1906-1991) was raised as a girl and lived his life in drag, even as a husband and father, eventually becoming legally recognized as a woman in 1953. And muralist Marcelle Routier (1915-2001) resurrected a career eviscerated by wartime as a celebrity ghostwriter.