The Heredia Women of the Arsenal

Here’s another example of where it may help if you picture me at my desk, with my brow furrowed, scratching my head a little, and with notes scattered all around me. I’m trying to work out one thing.

Why would a famous research library in Paris file documents about and from a woman’s husband, her lover, her son and her father, all under a name she made up?

Because that’s what the BnF Arsenal library in Paris appears to have done. Many years ago, granted. The woman was Marie de Heredia, daughter of the Cuban-born poet José Maria de Heredia. She married the poet Henri de Régnier, and she wrote under a male nom de plume: Gérard d’Houville. The Arsenal catalogue includes papers under the name Papiers Gérard d’Houville. Not simply under Régnier, not simply under Heredia, but under the name she invented.

I wanted to understand how these papers came to be together at the Arsenal, and whether the catalogue could tell me who had kept them and why.

So, in my mind, I’m now in the library, and I open the first box, and the first thing in it is Marie’s own handwriting: family trees of the Heredia family. And next to them is a 1670 certificate of noble blood, issued in Valladolid to the Heredia family. Then her girlhood poems, written between 1880 and 1892, with many pages in her father’s handwriting. Then a diploma from 1958, a Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, awarded to Gérard d’Houville. Gosh, incredible, what a find.

Then the nitty-gritty, the everyday things. Her diaries and address books. A notebook of beauty recipes and where she bought things. Thirty-two chequebook stubs. An English exercise book. Photographs of the three Heredia sisters as children, and of her sister Louise’s wedding. Even X-rays of her lungs and her son’s, which are catalogued too.

Then my mind goes to the men.

Her husband Henri’s papers. Letters from her lover, Pierre Louÿs, who went on to marry her sister Louise, about a novel they planned to write as an exchange of letters. And the work of her son Tigre, who was Pierre de Régnier on paper, though the Arsenal’s own curator says Louÿs was his father. Tigre drew a weekly column called “Paris, ma Grand’Ville” for the magazine Gringoire from 1930 to 1939, and the original drawings are there.

I’m not sure about you, but at this stage my mind is spinning a little around the family names and relationships and nom de plumes on top of that :)

I found it helpful to spend some time mapping the family and its relationships. Perhaps you will, too.

The men weren’t quiet about her. The curator says Louÿs wrote her magnificent poems and, against the Heredias, a violent pornographic novel that wasn’t published until 1925, after he died. Henri, she adds, got his own back in novels and poems about his wife. Wikipedia adds that Louÿs photographed her nude and that D’Annunzio was her lover from 1910 to 1914. She was compared to Anna de Noailles and to Colette, whom she knew well.

As if that’s not enough, then there’s this one envelope in Henri’s papers. It holds forty letters from a woman called Madeleine Bougenaux, and on the front, in Henri’s own handwriting, it says they’re to be destroyed. They weren’t. Beside it is another batch from her: thirty-seven letters and a postcard to Henri, and two to Marie, the last a letter of condolence dated 31 October 1943.

There is so much more to this story than a name in a library catalogue. And those letters have left me with questions I haven’t been able to answer.

If you’d like to stay with me as I follow the trail through the Heredia family, its papers and the mysteries of what was kept, join me below.

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