Lisette—piquant, kinky-haired and turned-up nose—is in town. She arrived late yesterday afternoon, her white sailor hat with its elaborate trimmings of fluff and feathers, her blue silk short waist with its little frills of lace all about the throat and wrists, her animated manner and lively conversation, and her intense interest in everything that happened making her a figure of distinction among the throngs of easy-going American travelers who got off the train.
—“Lisette Is Here,” Minneapolis Times, August 25, 1898
The Famous Fast Female Flyers had by the summer of 1898 made repeat trips to many midwestern cities and expanded their circuit to Iowa, Kentucky, and Tennessee—and finally as far south as New Orleans, where Dottie and Tillie had their early August showdown. Crowds in the new cities were solid, but to maintain interest back in the Midwest, the sport needed a jolt. That jolt came in late August, when several years of vague hints and rumors about a phenomenally fast and exceptionally beautiful cycling champion from France finally took solid form when the twenty-seven-year-old cyclist arrived on American shores. Her birth name was Amélie Le Gall, but she was known to all by the mononym Lisette—and from the start, she seemed the stuff of legend.
During that summer and fall any number of origin stories circulated about this seemingly mythical French creature, tales that ranged from the prosaic to the fantastic. The story that reached Philadelphia was that she’d grown up in Brittany, a poor shepherdess who while tending her family’s flock in the very early 1890s would lean on her crook and gaze longingly at the cyclists traversing the French countryside. One day a passing wheelman paused to flirt with the pretty mademoiselle, discovered her longings, and promised to return with a bicycle just for her. The gallant gentleman kept his promise and returned not just with a bicycle but also with an offer of marriage, which the young lady duly accepted. The husband soon became her trainer, and her career as a professional cyclist was under way.1
The story in New York was that the young Amélie had been a “wan, half-dead girl” living on a farm in Quintin, Brittany, when her desperate father called a physician, who prescribed a particularly modern treatment: the girl should take up the bicycle. She did just that, gradually building her muscles and endurance until she eventually started racing. Her transformation made her “a wonderful example,” according to the New York Journal, to women the world over—living proof that hard physical training could lead to beauty and robust health.2
A much different and no doubt apocryphal story reached Minneapolis, the site of Lisette’s first American race. According to the Journal, “the blood of royalty flows through her veins, and she is a direct descendant of one of the chivalrous Louises, whose reigns were the most elegant in history.” Those who shared her royal blood weren’t so happy with her decision to race for a living, and after the young rider won a well-publicized race in Berlin, “she was called to Paris by the Duke d’Orleans, pretender to the throne of France, while other members of the family were keenly humiliated and descendants of the blood exerted every reasonable effort to keep her from entering any other races.” But Amélie refused to listen: “It might have been pique, it might have been pride, it might have been an ambition for supremacy, it might have been a wild desire to feel free and unhampered, that caused her a year ago last June to dash off to Vienna and there, amidst the plaudits of 50,000 people, demonstrate her marvelous accomplishments.”3
The Minneapolis Sunday Times offered a more credible, yet still remarkable, version of Amélie’s childhood. She was born, wrote the Times, in 1871 in the small village of Puteaux on the outskirts of Paris: “She was a good child, of the ordinary peasant type, kind, generous, modest, with a certain charm of manner and address that belong only to the peasants living in the vicinity of Paris.” What made Amélie extraordinary was that, despite being very small, “she loved to lead.” She was the fastest runner in the village, the best climber of trees, and the loudest singer in church. She and her father, a carpenter well versed in French history, worshiped the great French leader Napoléon. Amélie could recite graphic details of all his victories. She could draw a map of the battlefield at Waterloo with all the armies’ positions. Napoléon was little Amélie’s hero and inspiration.
Likewise inspired by the former emperor, Monsieur Le Gall dreamed of becoming more than just a humble carpenter. He wanted to be an architect. So when Amélie was thirteen, he moved his family to the great city of Paris. Unfortunately, work there was scarce, and the family grew very poor. Within a year, Amélie’s father got sick and died. Amélie was forced to find work in a factory, “a great black factory, in a room where the workwomen never saw a ray of sunshine from early morn until night.” She worked there through her teenage years, growing pale and thin, “and seemed like a little shadow as she crawled to and from her work.”
As in the Philadelphia version, the savior in this story was Amélie’s future husband. This time he had a name, Émile Christinet. He worked in an electrical shop overlooking the factory. Drawn to the “pale face and hollow cheeks of the little girl,” he feared for her life and consulted with a prominent physician about her condition. The doctor said she had anemia and told Monsieur Christinet that she would die if she was not rescued from the factory, “so the kind hearted Frenchman took the girl in charge.”
In this story, cycling once again became Amélie’s way to health. First, Christinet simply sent her to the country, the traditional Victorian cure of fresh air and free time. It didn’t work: “She would sit for hours with her hands folded idly in her lap, looking out of the window at the green grass and blue sky.” That’s when the physician prescribed exercise, and Monsieur Christinet bought Amélie a child’s bike, “for although the girl was now 19, she was no larger than a child of 12.” Amélie loved cycling, and within a month the color had returned to her cheeks and she was full of vigor. Two months later she completed her first century ride, and within a year she was known throughout the city.4
This version of the story, undoubtedly embellished in places, does bear at least the faint imprimatur of Amélie herself, who told the Chicago Tribune, “Growing up puny and anemic, it was usual for me to swoon three times a week at the age of 21. With my physician’s consent I began to ride a wheel, and in four months was in much better condition. I have had excellent health from that time on.”5 An 1896 membership roster of the Touring Club of France lists Émile Christinet as an engineer-electrician living in Puteaux, and other sources confirm Quintin, Brittany, as Lisette’s likely birthplace, so it’s reasonable to conclude that Lisette grew up in Brittany, moved to Puteaux with her father, and was later taken under the care of Monsieur Christinet, who indeed became her husband.6
However she got there, the young Amélie did become by 1894 the most celebrated cyclienne in Paris. That’s about the time she adopted what she later called her nom de guerre. “I was christened Lisette at an electrical exhibition,” she explained, “when I rode a nice, easy-going wheel which saved my poor ankles an immense amount of exertion because it was run by battery. The exhibition was held in Paris. Soon after that I began to race, and then I was called many names—La Petite, La Jolie Lisette, La Belle—oh, I cannot tell you all the names I have been called by the French journals.”7
As her nicknames suggest, Lisette was both small and pretty. She was reported to stand less than five feet tall and weigh under a hundred pounds—as little as eighty-two pounds, by one account.8 She was attractive, but her real beauty emanated from her charming and at times provocative personality. In May 1896, a full two years before Lisette arrived on American soil, she was already making headlines in Chicago because of the outfits she wore in London. “The French girl’s costume,” reported the Chronicle, “was sufficiently scanty to leave her legs free movement, and on this account she was subjected to some comment on the part of English women who visited the Aquarium during the race.” Lisette couldn’t understand all the fuss: “Sometimes I hear them say, ‘shocking,’ ‘scandalous,’ ‘immodest,’ and even femmes impudiques.” Such critics were, to her mind, simply being hypocritical. “What do they do?” she asked. “They go away when they are tired of watching the race and applaud the danseuse on the stage, who show so much of themselves. Or they go to the ladies’ swimming entertainment. And because we wear a costume suitable to exertion on the wheel, they say we are immodest.”9
The portrait that emerged from Europe, then, featured a charming and outspoken young woman with an intriguing past and a memorable name. But word also arrived of her outstanding accomplishments on the track. Sporting Life reported as early as the spring of 1895 that she’d ridden a hundred kilometers in four hours, thirty-one minutes, “the female record for Brittany.”10 That would be just less than fourteen miles an hour, not as fast as Tillie and Lizzie managed in their century rides around Chicago in 1895 but impressive nonetheless. In November 1895 the Times of London reported that Lisette finished a six-day, twenty-one-hour race at the Westminster Aquarium with 368 miles plus six laps on a ten-lap track, good for an average of 17.6 mph—almost exactly what Dottie achieved a month later in her debut eighteen-hour victory in Minneapolis.11
Once the American racing circuit got up and running in 1896, reporters obsessed over women’s speed and distance comparisons. On May 27 of that year, when Tillie, Dottie, and the other Americans were pushing twenty miles an hour as an average speed, the patriotic Chicago Chronicle huffily reported that Lisette, Europe’s “champion woman cyclist,” had won a recent race at London’s Aquarium by completing 438 miles in a six-day, forty-eight-hour race. “The performance of a fraction over nine miles an hour is not remarkable, and in a man would be considered very slow.”12 In fact, that race ran just four hours a day, not eight, so it was a twenty-four-hour contest, putting Lisette’s average closer to eighteen miles per hour, more in line with what the Americans were achieving.13
Beginning in 1897, rumors swirled of Lisette’s imminent arrival in the United States, making possible a true international championship. First the Cycle Carnival Company’s Bobby Smiley was said to be negotiating with Lisette to come to America for a superstar matchup that summer between the Frenchwoman and the Big Five. For months, gossips buzzed about an imminent international showdown at Madison Square Garden. Fall gave way to winter, and the rumor now was that Phil Sjöberg was negotiating terms for a Garden race in April 1898. Nothing came together, but all the while Lisette’s record of achievements kept getting more impressive, at least as reported in America. Her outdoor hundred-kilometer time dropped by an hour to 3:29. “That record,” added the New York Journal, “was made over a rough country road, and so astounded French riders that the best trainers took her up and she became the champion of France.”14 The Columbus Sunday Morning Press reported that she once rode two hours at a 2:15 clip—nearly twenty-seven miles per hour, much faster than any of the American racers had managed.15 John S. Johnson, the Minneapolis racer, traveled to France sometime during this period and brought home news of Lisette in action, claiming that she’d made 29.6 miles in an hour. “If there are any women alive who can beat that,” Johnson said, “let them try it. I consider her the marvel of the age.”16
Various newspapers reported Lisette’s one-hour record to be in the neighborhood of twenty-nine miles, making Tillie’s New Orleans record of twenty-six miles look hopelessly second-rate. The general story was that Lisette easily beat every woman challenger, including Frankie Nelson, still considered by many as the American champion, during Frankie’s trip to Europe in 1896. “In fact,” said the St. Paul Globe, “so easy were her victories over the women against whom she rode that they lost all interest to the public, and she began challenging the men.”17
The most persistent of Lisette’s “battle of the sexes” stories involved a race against Jimmy Michael, the great Welsh champion, in February 1896. Michael, considered by many to be the only real rival in the late 1890s to the American champion Marshall “Major” Taylor, was in at least one sense the male version of Lisette: at five feet, one and a half inches, he was one of the shortest men on the racing circuit. In Europe the two diminutive racers became inevitably linked, and finally someone arranged for the two—Little Jimmy and La Petite Lisette—to compete head-to-head in Paris. It was a fifty-kilometer race (about thirty-one miles), and Michael agreed to grant Lisette a handicap, some say of three kilometers, but Lisette herself claimed it was “over five miles.”18 In any case, “Lisette jumped out to an early lead,” according to the St. Paul Globe, “beyond the handicap.”19 After an hour, she had reportedly made twenty-eight miles, and she pushed Michael all the way to the finish. In the politically incorrect vernacular of the day, the Chicago Chronicle reported that “it was a close race from start to finish and the midget did not have it won till the tape was crossed and only then by a small margin.” The article ends by making clear that the “gracious” Jimmy Michael, clearly the superior rider based on past records, “did not try hard to win.”20 This is likely true, although it’s also possible that the male reporters simply couldn’t fathom such a challenge from a female rider. Whatever the details, it made for a great story.
After all this anticipation, Lisette finally arrived in New York on Sunday, August 21, 1898, on the steamer La Gascogne. With her was her husband, acting as trainer and publicist. After a brief stopover in New York—long enough to inspire a couple of feature stories there—Lisette and Émile boarded a train for Minneapolis for her first American race, slated to begin September 5. It had been arranged by Jim Wirtensohn, one of three brothers active in the Twin Cities cycling scene. Neither Lisette nor her husband spoke much English, but that only delighted reporters eager to use their schoolboy French for interviews with the cyclienne.
To put it mildly, the American sports scribes were charmed, despite finding Lisette a bit less ravishing than the rumors had promised. “Lisette is very far from what is generally considered the pretty type of woman,” declared the Minneapolis Times. “But for how much does mere beauty count when compared with those saucy shrugs, those little graceful gestures, that pretty way of punctuating remarks with eccentric exclamations and that hail of nicknames, which seem like terms of endearment when spoken in a caressing, chirpy voice that is a sauce piquante to everything said?—and all these belong to Lisette.”21
Reporters described everything about her. Her eyes were “long, blue and merry,” her mouth was “small, although it grows very wide when she smiles,” and her hair was “fair and worn very bouffant about the face, then twisted into a tall knot on the top of her head.” She slept nine hours a night, ate only plainer foods, and drank strong tea and coffee. She was “immensely proud” of a silk sash presented to her by Vélocipède Illustré in 1894 for winning a hundred-kilometer championship race, and even in the United States she never missed an opportunity to show it off, “throwing it across one shoulder and knotting it at the waist line.” Still, despite all her accomplishments, she managed to come across as courteous, modest, and even a bit shy.22
Lisette spoke highly of her husband, “a burly, good-natured Frenchman,” wrote the Times, and credited him with all her success. “He is my inspiration,” she said. “I could not ride without him. He is as necessary as my cup of coffee. You know I always have my cup of coffee, whether I am in training or not, else I should not know whether I was to win or lose the race.”23
Lisette’s claim about the coffee puzzled the rapt reporters, who strained to translate her breezy French. “Oh, but you do not understand,” she exclaimed. “What a stupid I am. I forgot that everybody does not know the habits and fancies of Lisette.” So she explained:
“It is like this: I know if I am to win or lose by the bubbles in my cup of coffee. I drop in the lump of sugar—if there are many bubbles there is much money for me, that means I win the race. If few, I lose. Oh, the sign never fails, and there have always been many bubbles. Just once do I remember there were no bubbles. That day I lost. It was a long time ago. I lost the race to Mlle. Reille. I can never forget it. My husband said I made up my mind to lose. That was not so. It was the bad sugar they put in my coffee. Down went a lump but there were no bubbles. Then I put in another, still no bubbles. Then a third, with the same result. The coffee was spoiled—I could not drink it—and I knew that the day was spoiled too, and I went away with tears and that night I could not ride. But it was good for me. Now I always look for a lump of sugar with many little holes in it. Then they bubble beautifully and so I always win. Every morning on shipboard I had my coffee and every morning there were many, many bubbles, and I would say: Bravo, Lisette, la championne.”24
True to her hero Napoléon, Lisette had always been highly competitive. “It was not an uncommon sight,” wrote the Minneapolis Sunday Times, “to see the grown-up child jump from her wheel and clap her hands together and cry out in rage when some stronger cyclienne outrode her.” Later, after she’d become a skilled rider and completed a handful of century runs, she overheard her husband talking of the wonderful riding of a well-known actress, a Mlle de Batz. Such talk infuriated Lisette. “I can ride faster than she,” she cried, bursting into the room where her husband and his guests were talking. “I will challenge her, and you shall see—all of you. Then it will be of me that you talk, and Mlle de Batz will be forgotten.”25
Her husband was also her sideline coach. “When he smiles,” explained the Minneapolis Times, “Lisette knows that she is riding well, but when he raises his eyebrows she knows she must work harder.” Lisette described in dramatic terms how Monsieur Christenet could, with just a few words, ease the stress and strain of competition:
“The others are ahead of me. I see their little legs go up and down, up and down. I can see nothing else. I am afraid. They seem so big and strong and I feel so small. I am always the little one in the race. We have gone around the track once and I hear someone whisper. ‘Bravo, la petite’—it is my husband. Then I grow strong. I am greater than any one of those. There is no one to say to them, ‘Bravo, ma petite.’ I must win. The band plays lively airs. Still I see those legs in front of me going up and down, up and down. This time, perhaps no one whispers, ‘Bravo,’ and I am frightened. I see those black eyebrows. They are very high on his forehead. Then surely I must win else those eyebrows will always stay up there where they do not belong. I go faster and faster. I am mad, furious, at those girls who ride in front. It grows more and more exciting. The music becomes louder and the time faster and faster. I feel like a bird. My wheel goes by itself. I pass them. One in white with an English flag flying from her shoulder, another in red, still another one in black. Crash, crash, crash goes the music but I cannot hear it. I must win. And I do, and the crowd cheers and carries me off on their shoulders and I know that the eyebrows have come down and that there is a smile and that by and by someone will whisper in my ear, ‘Ma Lisette, ma championne,’ and I am happy.”26
She was asked about her celebrated race with Jimmy Michael. “Oh, yes, I raced with Monsieur Michael once,” she replied. “That was three years ago, however, when I had not so much experience as now. I should like to enter the lists again with Monsieur Michael, but I believe that the League of American Wheelmen does not permit a man to race with a woman. I am sorry, for I should like another try.”27
Besides knowing about the LAW and its rules, Lisette knew another key difference in American racing: there would be no pacemakers. In Europe men on tandems led pairs of women around the tracks, maintaining pace and allowing the women to conserve energy behind the windbreak. The races were really about keeping up with the pacemakers until the final push, when the pacemakers would leave the track to the two competitors. In America racers had to employ much more strategy throughout the race—risking fatigue, of course, but also expending the mental and physical energy associated with jockeying for position.
The race in Minneapolis was billed as the world’s championship. Even the New York papers paid attention, although the apparently clueless Journal named Lisette’s chief competitor “Miss Nellie Anderson, the Chicago flyer, who holds all records for America.”28 In Minneapolis, according to the Times, “the eyes of the entire Bicycle world” would be focused on the race, which would pit “all the fastest female riders” against Lisette, “the fastest human being that ever rode a wheel. She challenges any living rider, either man or woman.”29
The Wirtensohns built a brand-new track, reputed to be the finest yet made and “the fastest ever built in the West,” inside the massive Exposition Building in downtown Minneapolis, where the city was hosting the state fair and celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The Festival of Fire ran September 5–10 and featured such attractions as the Maze, the Palace of Illusions, the Hawaiian Village, the Streets of Cairo, and the Chamber of Death.30 The women’s race drew a major share of the publicity, and Lisette garnered a major share of that. A quarter-page ad appearing before the start of the festival set “MLLE. LISETTE” in banner font and called her “the fastest human being that ever rode a bicycle.” The race began Monday night, the culmination of the festival’s opening day. “Unless something unforeseen occurs,” promised the Sunday Times, “this will be the greatest cyclienne contest in the history of racing annals. Records will go glimmering. Thousands of dollars will change hands, and the winner will be in very truth, and beyond all dispute, the champion cyclienne of the world.”31