She was becoming more aware of social issues and orders. She knew that governmental and civic systems were the means whereby society took care of its members and they aroused her interest. While she was writing these articles, she was piecing together material on the maintenance of Paris streets for New England Magazine, detailing how the city was paved, lit, and landscaped. She carefully noted the communal facilities for domestic life—public baths, water, and laundry systems—all of which, she wrote, would be a great blessing to the poor of the United States. Hers was the zeal and sensibility of the reformer. In lauding French civic virtues, she was tacitly holding up for censure America’s neglect in these areas.
Now she was truly independent with only letter writing to tie her to her past. She was Ida Tarbell and no one else: she was an achieving woman, accepted by French intellectuals, sought out and encouraged by Scribner’s, the magazine she most respected, and being wooed by a new publication, McClure’s, which she thought would surpass it. The earnest, naive Ida Tarbell who had been so demoralized by T. L. Flood was gone.
No one could snicker at the enthusiasm or the bohemianism in which she indulged. When the student revolt of 1893 exploded below her windows, Ida climbed on her balcony clad only in her nightgown to observe it merrily with the quaking Egyptian at the next window. She continued to go about the city at night until she was caught in a charge of soldiers and had to throw herself against a doorway to avoid the whizzing bullets.
After the czar’s sailors entered Paris that fall to celebrate the Russian-Franco Alliance, she at first dismissed the gesture as a cheap attempt to get a loan. She watched their parade indifferently until the rousing French enthusiasm captured her; she jumped onto a chair, waving her handkerchief and cried, “Vive la Russie! Vive la Russie!”
Still, she was sometimes so homesick that when a long-sought picture of her father arrived, she hugged it to her breast and lovingly examined each line and shadow. Two and a half years had produced wrinkles she had not noticed before. She wrote home insisting there must be a mistake in the proof: lines could not exist in the original and they must make the photographer erase them.
She cheered herself up by going to the Jardin des Plantes. “The kangaroos and red-legged flamingos are what I go to see. There is nothing in Paris which will cure me of the blues so quick as seeing a kangaroo hop.”12
And she often needed cheering. Her problem was money and her need so dire—especially after a night of pain convinced her she needed seventy-five dollars’ worth of dentistry—that she humbled herself and sought an assignment from Dr. T. L. Flood. McClure’s promised payments—which now totaled one hundred dollars—were not forthcoming. He, like nearly everyone else in America, was the victim of the stock market crash and financial depression known as the Panic of 1893. In the United States, over eight thousand businesses failed, banks included. McClure held on by selling shares of his magazine to anyone he could cajole. Doing his share, Phillips mortgaged his parents’ home. Ida forgave her debtors, but had to pay her own debts.
She knew that Dr. Flood was one editor who would be honor-bound to pay her promptly. Her family was horrified when she told them what she planned. Esther offered to sell one of her prized cows from Hatch Hollow to provide her with money, but Ida was adamant. She also suspected that Flood might be in a fence-mending mood; he had run for Congress and voters, particularly those in Meadville, had soundly rejected him. Flood was indeed conciliatory. He commissioned two 2500-word articles on “The Salons of Paris” for which he would pay one hundred dollars.
She well remembered the instructive tone of The Chautauquan and came up with the moral to be gained from these social gatherings. She conceded that the salons of the eighteenth century were often scandalous, but said that those of the 1890s were, for the most part, models of propriety that fostered good manners and offered people a chance to form social networks. She recommended that American women adopt the custom.
Meanwhile, Ida had been putting off Mme Bonnet about her rent and her pride would allow her to do it no longer. She took her courage and her sealskin coat to a pawnshop. But the pawnbroker was suspicious of her when Ida admitted that she had never registered as an alien. He said he would not return her coat until she provided proof of her identity or a person to vouch for her. She wanted no one to know of her predicament, so she hurried back to Rue Malbranche, scooped up letters from editors, her exhausted checkbook, and all her papers. She presented them all to the skeptical pawnbroker, but only when she unrolled her diploma from Allegheny College with its Latin and seals and engravings did he give her enough money to pay pressing stationery bills.
In a few weeks, quick by the standards of the day, a check for twenty-five dollars arrived from her family. She thanked them in a fervent letter that ended, “I feel like a genuine ‘black sheep—prodigal son’ and all that.”13
After money, her greatest woe was that she no longer liked the woman she was writing about. Ida had slept in Mme Roland’s provincial bed, handled her jewels, touched her clothes. She had read the journals of the day and had come to understand the motives of her heroine’s antagonists. Mme Roland had fortitude, but instead of a model woman, a disillusioned Ida had found a multidimensional human being with a “Providence complex,” who observed “that eternal and necessary natural law that the woman backs up her man.”14
Roland’s evolution from Royalist to Republican and Revolutionary followed the trail of the man she loved, not ideological conviction. She fomented bloodshed and toyed with lives to achieve power. She was not wise and idealistic, but ambitious and theatrical. The French Revolution itself no longer seemed to Ida a glorious purge but a human folly that merely redistributed abuse.
Studying Mme Roland’s private papers and interviewing her descendants convinced Ida that her subject had been a glory seeker. Had she judged prominent men as severely as she examined women, she might well have found self-love and personal ambition buried under the myths. In a woman, however, Ida thought these qualities base.
Ida was as unsettled by Mme Roland’s imperfections as she had been by evolution. Darwin had cracked her trust in religion. Mme Roland shattered her faith in woman. Now Ida knew her heroine to be more instrumental in her own fate. Mme Roland had pursued her future husband, then manipulated him.
The biography Ida eventually produced went against several literary conventions. Victorian biography tended to reproduce the full context of an era, which made for massive life-and-times works in which detail often eclipsed the person’s story. Most contemporary biographers eulogized their subjects, but Tarbell was critical of Mme Roland and came closer to the “debunking” school of later years that dismantled heroes.
In letters at the Bibliothéque Nationale, Ida discovered the story of Mme Roland’s having sought a title before the revolution. “Those biographers who had access to these letters have been too ardent republicans or admirers of their heroine to dwell on an episode of her career which seemed inconstant with her later life,” Tarbell announced in her introduction. In fact, she was wrong about this. John S. C. Abbott’s Marie Jeanne Roland de la Platière related this incident on page 93. Tarbell herself was guilty of deliberate omission. Her scholarly sin was to suppress what she regarded as unsuitable. She ignored what Mme Roland proclaimed in her memoirs— that she had been molested by her father’s apprentice and was so traumatized that she decamped to a convent and avoided marriage for years.
Mme Roland’s handwritten memoirs told in some detail how the youth had forced her to sit on his lap and caused her to cry out, “What is that thing in my back?”15 Tarbell was appalled that Roland would repeat such a vulgar thing and attributed this tasteless lapse to the influence of Rousseau’s Confessions. Today a biographer would examine closely the professed cause of a girl’s flying to the convent after her first sexual experience, but Ida obscured the matter by saying simply that the profane atmosphere of Roland’s home had interrupted her devotions, so she had asked to leave.
Ida
observed of Mme Roland’s candor: “When she came to writing her life, she dragged to light unimportant and unpleasant details because Rousseau had had the bad taste to do the same before her. The naiveté with which these things are told will convince anyone that cares to examine the Memoirs that they mean nothing but she had taken the foolish engagement to tell everything she could about her life.”16
Other nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon chroniclers might have felt likewise. Such an admission as Manon Roland’s could not have been published in the America of that day; however, Ida’s insistence that these details were merely “unimportant and unpleasant” and her censuring tone are further examples of her own determined avoidance of the sexual life. One can only speculate why this is so. Mme Roland overcame her early trauma well enough to be able to write about it for the world to read, but if Tarbell had a similar experience, she certainly did not allow it to be known. It seems more likely that Ida, who needed a fierce sense of herself to defy conventional modes, feared surrendering herself in any way and was most uncomfortable with the thought of sexual surrender.
Her conclusions on Mme Roland indicate that she thought love made a woman unfit for the public world. She charged that Roland’s republicanism sprang solely from jealousy of the king’s grandeur: “It was the woman’s nature which, stirred to its depths by enthusiasm or passion, becomes narrow, stern, unbending—which can do but one thing, can see but one way; that inexplicable feminine conviction which is superior to experience and indifferent to logic.”17
Fifteen years later, Ida Tarbell admitted she might have been too harsh. “Mme Roland made a reactionist of me. I think I was pretty hard on her sometimes but it was not on her really. It was rather on myself and my sex. You see I started out thinking I had an impeccable heroine and I found qu’une pauvre femme [“only a poor woman”] and I fear I took it out on her rather stiffly.”18
Ida Tarbell found Manon Phlipon Roland guilty of falling in love and thus making herself liable to error. A short story Ida wrote during this period, together with quotes from the manuscript of Madame Roland, show that painful vulnerability quivered under the game and self-deprecating Tarbell facade. Ida Tarbell romanticized love but expressed cynical doubt as to whether or not love was actually possible or enduring. In her view, love, while it lasted, so consumed a woman that it incapacitated her for anything else.
She stressed that Madame Roland’s judgment had been clouded by thoughts of her lover and wrote what she would repeat for the rest of her life: “A woman in love is never a good politician … The sentiments, the opinions, the course of action of her lover, become personal matters with her. She is incapable of judging them objectively. She defends them with the instinctive passion of the animal, because they are hers. Intelligence has little or nothing to do with this defense. Even if she be a cool-headed woman with a large sense of humor and sees that her championship is illogical, she cannot give it up.”
Of the Rolands’ marriage, Ida wrote: “Their relation had come to the point to which every intimate human relation must come, where forebearance, charity, a bit of humorous cynicism, courage, self-sacrifice, character and nobility of heart must sustain it instead of dreams, transports, passion.”19 Noble tolerance, not love or physical need, was required once infatuation ended.
One can only wonder what happened to Ida Tarbell that she found love such a sharp and jagged condition. It was true that her parents were not ideally suited, nor was her brother’s home ideal. Still, her repeated insistence that matrimony inevitably cooled to mere arrangement suggests the subject must have had some personal resonance for her. One could wonder whether the intensity of her statements stems from some early attraction to a married man, perhaps even the Reverend T. L. Flood. Possibly she wrote this thinking of Sam McClure. In any event, an unconsummated attachment to someone who remained loyal to his wife would have given her romantic fervor an outlet and would have ennobled her spinsterhood while not jeopardizing it in any way. Unfortunately, Ida Tarbell, unlike Manon Roland, would never confess to an unhappy love affair or leave traces of any such circumstance in her papers. Tarbell’s life shows that she did not dare make the mistake of allowing herself to become preoccupied by anyone. She felt clearly that woman could never achieve both love and a profession. Ida chose the world, but as a working woman and an unmarried one, she felt twice vulnerable, according to a piece of fiction she produced at this time.
Her short story heroine, Helen Walters, who wrote for Earth and Moon magazines (just as Tarbell herself wrote for anything under the sun) expresses Ida’s own sensitivities: “Like many young women who follow the hard path of journalism alone, Helen Walters had grown suspicious and acutely sensitive to slights. She could endure overwork, grumbling editors, loss of position, she could make her way out of tight places with cat-like agility. What she could not support was the critical stare of women of assured position, the questioning regard of a society that felt itself superior to her. A suspicious look stung her like a blow. She might support it with an appearance of indifference; but once alone, she had a feminine crisis of bitterness, of tears, of humiliation. She was mortified when she realized Mrs. Ford’s tolerance and the men’s half-amused glances. She was furious that she had forgotten her maxim of trusting no one—why should she have believed people were kinder in Paris than New York?”20
The plot of the story is simple—and revealing—enough: Helen Walters meets a man named Fullerton who invites her to visit his married friends, but Helen learns the wife, Mrs. Ford, objects to meeting a woman so déclassé as to run around Europe alone doing journalism. Helen becomes ill over all the slights, but refuses Mrs. Ford’s help. Imagine the passion of Ida Tarbell when she wrote Helen’s retort: “You take care of me! You, who despised me because I was alone! Do you suppose I would accept help from a woman who thinks herself better than me because she is loved and cared for and supported; who scorns me because I earn my bread; who, when I come friendless into the same house with her in a strange land turns her back on me! Take care of me! No! No!”
Mrs. Ford realized the girl’s accusation was just: “She had a swift new view of herself: a harsh uncharitable woman, a woman sheltered on every side, wounding a woman exposed on every side.” She fled in tears to her husband, who approved of the transformation.
Meanwhile, Helen Walters is taken to the hospital. To save her job, Fullerton and his friends write her articles for her and find this much more challenging than they expected. Among Miss Walters’s notes, Mrs. Ford finds Helen’s description of a poorly dressed American woman whom she recognizes to be herself, but she helps Helen anyway. A late twentieth-century woman would have been furious that they did her job as well as she—going so far as to win an editor’s commendation for their “Stunning Seaside Effects”—but Helen was grateful. She and Mrs. Ford had a good cry and Fullerton at last proposed to her.
The emaciated Miss Walters responds: “Why, I never thought of loving you. Only when I feel as I do today, I want a million dollars and somebody to take care of me. I have no judgment left. I suppose that if it were anybody else who had been kind to me and asked I should say ‘yes.’ I don’t think that it is you in particular. It is simply that you offer to look after me and I should love anybody who should do that.”
Impervious, Fullerton is certain she will learn to love him. But as Tarbell points out, Helen does not feel she is submitting to the higher calling of marital partnership; she simply throws in the towel because she is exhausted. Whether Helen Walters lived happily ever after or not we can only surmise. Her story ended when she found a man.
The most powerful dynamic in the story is the relationship between Helen and Mrs. Ford. The two were in competition not, as in many stories, for a man, but for the right to exist. Mrs. Ford was challenged by Miss Walters’s independence and Miss Walters was intimidated that Mrs. Ford had the love and protection of a man. Miss Walters is more likable, but Mrs. Ford’s way of life triumphs. Certainly Ida never analyzed or explicated her story i
n this fashion, but when it was accepted she wrote home: “The New England Magazine has been idiot enough to take a story. I’m half sorry they did. I believe I could write short stories if I had a little more leisure, but as it is I’m afraid I only murder them.”21
She did at last attend a series of lectures given by Ferdinand Brunetière, the critic who had so impressed her during her Chautauquan days. He was short, thin, and nervous, so puny as to appear almost ill; but when he spoke it seemed his voice thrived at the expense of his body. Ida was enthralled. She found in his talks exactly the methodical laying of idea upon idea that she had come to Paris to learn. But his other students were less admiring. Brunetière’s contempt for women, society, literature, and anything less than a hundred years old made him the pet of fashionable society, and his students resented it. One day he entered the grande salle of the old Sorbonne preceded as was customary by the janitor carrying a tray with a carafe of water, a glass, spoon, and sugar. As Tarbell made her notes, others began to chant “Brunetière, Brunetière!” He began again. So did they. Tarbell sat shocked and quailing as the lecturer tried to drown out his hecklers, but they advanced on him and inch by inch pushed him from the room.
When not in this lively classroom, she scurried about Paris securing comments and photographs of leading French writers, most of whom McClure wanted for the first issue of 1894. She returned to Pasteur several times before he was satisfied with his contribution: “In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails.”22
She then ventured to the homes of Alphonse Daudet, Alexandre Dumas fils, François Coppée, and Émile Zola. Daudet, a naturalist, was a chronicler of his times whose vivid improbable characters won him comparison with Dickens. Unknown to Ida, an anarchist called on him while she and his wife had tea. Ida was led into his study to find the author displaying his revolver and sputtering that his visitor had asked him for a louis with which to buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the hôtel de ville.
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