March 1868, rue de l’École de Médecine in Paris: doctor Régnier examines the corpse of Abel Barbin. Concluding that it was a case of male hermaphroditism, he discovered a manuscript alongside the unfortunate suicide. The text, transmitted to the influential Ambroise Tardieu, will be published by the good doctor, intending to warn about the “errors of sex” and their deplorable consequences.
The Memoirs of Abel[1], born Herculine thirty years earlier, testify to the painful destiny of the woman who lived for twenty-two years as a woman amongst women: brought up in a nunnery, she took charge of a boarding school for young girls just a few months before the judgments of the court of St Jean d’Angély rectified her civil status.
But in Paris, the great anonymous city where he hopes to blend in and start a new life, Abel is wasting away. The confusion that had once accompanied him has certainly dissipated with the officialization of his dominant masculinity, but it has given way to a pain of existence that not even the writing of his Memoirs can soothe.
The confusion was that of Herculine, the woman with the equivocal first name, at the crossroads of myth and gender. The pain is that of Abel lost in Paris, in this city that is all too real for him, that of the woman who does not exist.
Translation Joanne Conway
[1] [TN] English reference Barbin, Herculine (1980). Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. Intro. Michel Foucault, trans. R. McDougall. New York: Pantheon Books.