In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. 

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, dressage at the circus, 1899

Jenny de Rahden lies on the bed, half raised on an elbow. A gray-haired man who shares her elegant, strong-nosed profile—her father—stands over her, and behind him the room becomes shadow. In the photograph, Jenny lies on a strange counterpane, so great that it conceals the bed itself. Its overspilling edges are frilled, and it is white with large, dark, irregular spots. It has a curly, straggling tail: a horse in the invalid’s bedroom. She is thirty and she is blind, lying on the hide of the Hungarian stallion Csárdás, who carried her when she made her circus debut as a haute école or dressage performer. One day, she writes in her memoir, they’ll wrap Csárdás’s rough coat, the crackling hide that covered his aging, dipping back, around her and place her in her coffin. She hopes it comes soon.

Most of the écuyères or horsewomen of the nineteenth-century circus left no trace of their own thoughts behind. Jenny de Rahden wrote a book. Whether she did it because she needed money or needed to put down her own side of the story after years of being spoken for in the European press—or both—is unknowable but she called it a roman or novel. I can’t tell how much of it is genuine. Jenny lived in an era before fact-checking and though her life was undoubtedly tragic, her style is sometimes melodramatic. “Does life really throw up these bizarreries, of which novelists and playwrights seem to possess the only secret?” she asks at one point. Perhaps calling it a novel gave her freedom to rewrite a messier past and fit it into more conventional romantic feminine tropes, rejecting the saltier stories written about circus horsewomen by male writers of the period. She was, after all, writing in 1902 when the century had barely turned and respectability remained a stifling life vest for women. She’d known its constrictions and buoyancy since birth: Jenny was not circus-born and she had become an artiste to support her father when he bankrupted them by gambling on the stock exchange. As a performer, her reputation as a lady was constantly at risk, not least because she supported not one but two men with her earnings. This dance around sex, money, masculinity, and respectability deformed her whole life—and resulted in a murder in her name. Read More

In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. 

Blanche Allarty (source Rosine Lagier)

In Berlin, the old patches of wasteland left by the bombings of World War Two are vanishing, replaced by shiny glass and granite luxury apartments. But sometimes, the remaining squares of grass and cracked concrete will throw up white tents, brightly painted caravans, and swirls of colored light bulbs, moth-eaten camels grinding hay in their teeth—the unmistakable children’s-book shorthand for the circus. Scarlet and yellow posters sprout on neighborhood lamp posts offering matinee performances and promising that the animals are well kept (“Doesn’t your dog like driving in a car?” asked one poster I saw. “Our dogs are no different.”) At least once a Christmas season, a zebra escapes and gallops through a German town. Despite the animal-welfare restrictions and Netflix, the circus endures.

I wasn’t a child who liked clowns, and, barring a large and sticky red lollipop, I barely remember being taken to the Moscow State Circus when it visited my British hometown, but for the last nine years I’ve been scratching up the time and funds to immerse myself in another circus—that of nineteenth-century Paris—for days at a time. I’m looking for fragments of lives, for women who lived at the center of public attention while simultaneously being marginal. They dealt with racism, misogyny, abuse, and great physical danger but, like the circus, they endured.

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In the late summer of 1866, a black equestrian stuntwoman made her Paris debut and galvanized the city. She was known only as “Sarah the African,” and history has left us few traces of her: just some battered posters, inky clippings, and burlesque scripts. Sarah was, in the words of the men who wrote about her, “the finest horsewoman of the King of Morocco,” “an Ethiopian,” or “a statue of Florentine bronze.” A “negress” who performed as neither slave nor clown, whose name evoked Sarah Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman dissected by Georges Cuvier just a few decades before in Paris, and Selika, the queen heroine of Meyerbeer’s hit posthumous opera, L’Africaine. She was a woman named for a whole continent.

Sarah made her debut at the second Paris Hippodrome: an open-air arena in what is now the Place Victor Hugo, a little less fancy than the elaborate circus buildings then being constructed in the city. Clowns, trained animals, aerialists, and balloonists performed there before an audience of five thousand Parisians of all classes, sharing a lineup with spectacular historical enactments and horse races. The jockeys for some of these races were women—whom Albert Montémont called “frisky amazons”—who rode sidesaddle or drove chariots as they lashed their whips. There were also écuyères or horsewomen who performed dressage or dainty acrobatics involving flower garlands or handkerchiefs. And then there was Sarah, mounted astride, one hand gripping a fistful of mane, pistols in her belt.

On her debut in September she was billed above Méphistophélès the bareback horse, above a race of forty horses all mounted by women, above the rubber horseman, William Meyer, and even above Mlle Adèle, who made her Sidy-Laraby dance with no reins. The indefatigable impresario Pierre-Célestin Arnault was her boss and champion, and he laid it on thick for the press. “Nothing is more extraordinary than this femme sauvage,” he exclaimed. She was the daughter of a king, he said, she was the daughter of many kings!

I apologize that I can’t bring Sarah (or Sara—the journalists who wrote about her weren’t fussy about the spelling) the African to you in her own words, or even in photographic form. You get her filtered, drawn and written by white Frenchmen. But beyond the pidgin lines they attributed to her and their own beard-stroking critiques, we can glimpse a little of the real Sarah and her very real bravery and skill.

In the long oval of the Hippodrome, there was a race with dwarf jockeys. Then Sarah took to the track and began her “infernal exercises.” For six weeks, she galloped devilishly fast around the Hippodrome on her champagne-colored horse, hanging over his side by one foot as he leapt hurdles four feet high. Her cries could be heard above the orchestra as she fired shots from two pistols at imaginary pursuers, her head jerking just above the ground. No one could match the leaps she made or the way she pulled the splits. Sarah would not be caught nor equaled. She shared the runs with no one.

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