Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (1870) by Adolphe Belot

Adolphe Belot was the envy of his contemporaries Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert: his books, unlike theirs, were best-sellers. He specialized in popular fiction that provided readers with just the right mix of indecency and morality. But as is the fate of most "bestsellers," his work is now forgotten, while Flaubert and Zola shine higher than ever in the literary firmament...

Adolphe Belot (1829–90) was born in Guadeloupe, studied and practiced law in France, and became a playwright and novelist in Paris. The money he made from his many potboilers supported the rather extravagant lifestyle he led.

[Adolphe Belot]

One of Belot's most interesting books is Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (published in 1870 with a preface by Zola), which tells of the suffering of a hopelessly naive young man (the wealthy Adrien Giraud) whose ravishing new bride, Paule, will not agree to consummate the marriage. She locks her bedroom door and from the first night they are together, the husband has to sleep on the sofa in his study. Without for a moment imagining what could be the true cause of Paule's behavior, Adrien engages in a battle of wills with his new bride. He knows she has a close girlfriend (the Countess Berthe de Blangy) from the time they were at convent school, but 150 years ago that apparently didn't ring any bells. On top of that, he is really very much in love with her, also for her strong and independent character. He tries everything to bring her to reason: he uses all arguments he can think of; he forbids her to leave the house, visit her parents, or meet anyone else, alternately employing patience, seduction, trickery, tears, and violence - all unsuccessfully. At a certain time she stealthily leaves the house to go to an apartment in a downtown neighborhood and he stalks her to her assignment, thinking he has caught her: she must be in love with another man... but it turns out differently.

Eventually, when he decides to travel to be away from his wife for while, in Nice he happens to meet the Count de Blangy, the man who in fact is the husband of his wife's "inseparable friend," Berthe (with thanks to the conventions of the popular novel, where coincidence reigns supreme). From him he learns, to his amazement, that their wives are lovers... 

We are then two-thirds into the novel. So far, the story of the naive husband has been quite funny and interesting, but now 19th c. "morality" has to be served, so the novel goes downhill. The husbands decide to separate their wives geographically by traveling in opposite directions with them (wives are by 19th c. law required to follow their husbands). Adrien and Paule end up in Oran, in the French colony of Algeria (a city which later would become the setting of both The Pest by Albert Camus and The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles); Paule seems to gradually forget her Sapphic love, but in a last twist Berthe locates Paule and seduces her once again. In the meantime, the writer has suddenly made the so far fighting fit Paule ill, so that he can easily kill her off by the end of the book - in 19th c. literature, all transgressing women (Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, etc) are condemned to capital punishment by their loving authors.

The characters of the protagonists also change: from a witty, bantering woman (whom Adrien quite likes) the writer turns Berthe into a cunning seductress; Paule is initially a headstrong young woman but becomes an impressionable victim; and the passive and utterly naive Adrien develops some strategic notions.

Despite this weak finale, the novel is quite interesting and deserves to be read. Although the author clearly shared his society's reprehensible views on sex and gender, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife is recognized today as an important work of both French literature and of the history of sexuality. It also reveals tensions in nineteenth-century French society not apparent in canonical works of high culture. But above all: this highly original and ultimately tragic work of fiction from an underappreciated writer of nineteenth century France is great fun to read.

Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870) is in the public domain. This is also true for the English translation published in 1892 as Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife, which is available at Google Books.