Figure 10. Minou Drouet photographed for Paris Match, no. 346 (1955). Photograph by Phillippe Le Tellier. © Paris Match Archive/Getty Images
Minou Drouet
The Prodigy under Suspicion
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
—Edgard Varèse
Between September and December 1955 France was gripped by the so-called Minou Drouet affair, Minou being a previously unknown eight-year-old child poet who captured public interest. The publisher René Julliard had distributed a selection of her letters and poems in the form of a little pamphlet sent to critics, writers, and friends “to put down a marker” and provide advance publicity for the first commercial edition of Minou’s poetry, Arbre, mon ami (Tree, my friend), which was scheduled to appear in January 1956, whereafter it sold forty-five thousand copies. In the meantime, and in the absence of any book publication, the affair took off and developed into a full-scale controversy as the authenticity of Minou’s talent was called into question.
The controversy was pursued largely in the press, with the women’s magazine Elle and the daily newspaper Le Figaro playing key roles on either side of the ensuing debates about the nature of genius and its precocious manifestation. Public interest in Minou was sustained by journalists who sought to provide the necessary evidence, and articles about her were almost invariably accompanied by photographs—most often, several. Paris Match had been launched in 1949 and produced two lavishly illustrated reports on an undoubtedly photogenic Minou, where the child was, as it were, exhibited for public inspection (Figure 10). It was thanks to this middle-brow press that the child prodigy became what Maurice Blanchot described as an “object of collective curiosity,” and, ultimately, the target of suspicion.1
PRECOCITY OR IMPOSTURE?
As the controversy developed, fueled by contributions from Pasteur Vallery-Radot of the Académie française, the major literary journalists of the day, and figures as various and as well-known as Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and the singer-songwriter Léo Ferré, Minou Drouet became the focus for many of the uncertainties and contradictions associated with the notion of genius in the twentieth century. In due course, she roused both Sartre and Barthes to major critiques of the concept of genius, whether construed as imposture (Sartre) or the embodiment of contemporary bourgeois myth (Barthes), that seemed to sound its death knell.
Figure 10. Minou Drouet photographed for Paris Match, no. 346 (1955). Photograph by Phillippe Le Tellier. © Paris Match Archive/Getty Images
Minou was not the first precocious author of the modern period. Rimbaud’s “Les Poètes de sept ans” (Poets aged seven, written when he was sixteen) is prescient of the age at which Minou Drouet began her own literary career, and although the idiom of Rimbaud’s poem is very different from hers, his youthful example was a recurrent point of reference in the debates. So too was that of Raymond Radiguet, who had published his first poems and a novel at the age of seventeen, and died when he was only twenty. Le Diable au corps (The devil in the flesh, 1923) was promoted as “the first book by a novelist aged seventeen,” and its author’s literary precocity was compounded by the sexual precocity portrayed in his novel, which tells the allegedly autobiographical story of an adulterous affair between a teenage boy and a young married woman whose husband is a soldier at the front in the First World War. Radiguet had been energetically championed by Jean Cocteau, who himself had published his first collection of poetry at the age of nineteen and went on to cultivate what he called “the hieroglyphs of childhood” with Les Enfants terribles in 1929.2 However, when it came to Minou Drouet, Cocteau famously contributed to the debate with his devastating boutade, “All children below the age of nine possess genius, except Minou Drouet.”3
Closer to the example of Minou Drouet was Sabine Sicaud, whose Poèmes d’enfant (A child’s poems) was published in 1926, when she was only thirteen, with a preface by Anna de Noailles, who hailed “the poems of a child prodigy” as “always a success and always poetic.” Two years later—at the age of fifty-two—Noailles published a selection of her own Poèmes d’enfance (Childhood poems) with four photograph illustrations of her younger self and a long preface in which she recalled her early years and her first attempts at writing. Sabine Sicaud died of acute osteomyelitis at the age of fifteen, but in 1958, no doubt inspired by the success of Minou Drouet, her poems were given a new lease of life when they appeared complete under the title Les Poèmes de Sabine Sicaud (The poems of Sabine Sicaud) with an additional preface describing her short life and celebrating her “poetic genius.”4 In her memoir published in 1993, Ma vérité (My truth), Minou Drouet mentions other examples of child prodigies among her contemporaries, including Roberto Benzi, born in 1937, whose musical talents were portrayed in two films that appeared in 1950 and 1953, respectively, the first of which, appropriately titled Prélude à la gloire (The prelude to fame), won a prize at Cannes.5
The year before the Minou Drouet affair Françoise Sagan had provided a further instance of Radiguet’s provocative mix of sexual and literary precocity with her first novel, Bonjour tristesse, published in March 1954 (also by Julliard) when she was still only eighteen. In September 1955, just as the affair was taking off, Nabokov introduced the nymphet into the currency of high literary culture when Olympia Press published Lolita in Paris (Lolita herself is twelve but has no literary ambitions). Rather more innocent and more youthful examples of precocity still lingered in French cultural memory, and in 1949 Claude-Edmonde Magny, an intellectually sophisticated critic known for her work on the modern novel, edited and illustrated a de luxe volume under the title Les Enfants célèbres (Famous children) that is oddly redolent of the nineteenth-century tradition of children’s literature. It includes lists of child prodigies organized by the nature of their gifts (poetry, painting, science, mathematics, music, etc.) and by their national origin, with brief thumbnail sketches of their achievements.6
A degree of anxiety about imposture was also in the air. Pascal Pia, one of the leading literary critics of the time, had recently had his fingers burned over the supposed discovery of a lost manuscript by Rimbaud, La Chasse spirituelle (The spiritual pursuit), in a case that strengthened the association between precocity and fraud. The manuscript, whose real existence had in any case always been in doubt, turned up under mysterious circumstances in the offices of the journal Combat. It was authenticated by Pia, who published extracts from it in May 1949, whereupon its status as a forgery was revealed by the perpetrators of the scam. They were a pair of young actors whose stage performance of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (A season in hell) had received bad reviews from the press, and the hoax was a pastiche designed to prove that their understanding of Rimbaud’s work was much greater than the critics had given them credit for. They described the hoax as “a joke,” but the result was a furor in which literary criticism itself was felt to be on trial.7
Introducing suspicion from a slightly different angle, the mention of Radiguet in association with Minou Drouet led another commentator to claim that Radiguet’s worth had been exaggerated by the publicity his novel had received—thanks in large part to Cocteau’s contribution—and that his reputation was not fully deserved. An article in the daily newspaper L’Aurore recalled the case of “little Beauchâteau,” a ten-year-old poet from the seventeenth century whose work turned out to have been written by his father, a case that Elle returned to in a roll call of child prodigies over the ages designed to provide a benchmark against which to assess the Minou phenomenon.8
The implications of these examples make the child prodigy distinctly suspect: either the child simply does not live up to the claims made on his behalf or he is prone to manipulative exploitation by self-interested adults. In her memoir, published in 1993, Minou Drouet herself recorded that René Julliard was considered to be “a champion of literary publicity,” and had a reputation as “Monsieur jeunes auteurs,” having also signed up Françoise Sagan and the twenty-one-year-old Françoise Mallet-Joris within a very short space of time.9 She even suggests that Julliard had orchestrated or at least instigated the “affaire Minou Drouet,” and that it made him the money that paid for the shiny new Cadillac that she noticed one day in the courtyard below his apartment.
Regardless of any opportunism on the part of adults, there was also a fear that the child prodigy might simply not mature into the adult genius. However fondly genius was imagined as precocity, precocity might be just that, and the precocious child fail to become the future genius. The journalist Georges Altmann, writing in Franc-Tireur on 17 November, did not doubt that Minou Drouet was the author of her own poetry, but nevertheless felt that the phenomenon of the child poet had served to debase the notion of genius:
It is enough nowadays for a young girl or a boy to show signs of a certain skill and a certain lack of modesty in the confidence of the public for a peculiar fuss and excitement to break out…. The age of geniuses by the dozen is turning into the age of bluffers and is falsifying every value! Nowadays literature is being concocted, like dwarves or bearded women in a fairground, on the basis of the unusual appearance of its authors. The time has come to reverse the tide and to restore to art its dignity, and to the word genius its Goethean, Hugolean, Racinian or Shakespearean meaning, which does not deceive.10 The child prodigy is little more than a circus freak and seems bound either to deceive or to disappoint. But with reminders in the press of the precocity of many of the great geniuses of the past—including Goethe and Hugo, whose precocious achievements were recorded among the examples of “child prodigies in History” listed by Elle in the number of 12 December—how was one to tell the difference?
THE MAKING OF A PRODIGY
Minou’s story made good copy for journalists of both camps. Although her precocious talent for poetry was the key feature of her identity, she had spent the first years of her life unable to speak at all and was written off as seriously retarded. Her biological mother was unmarried and her paternity unknown, and when Minou was adopted at the age of nearly two, she was virtually blind and largely unresponsive. She remained in this state, and the only form of communication she appeared to be capable of was barking in dialogue with the local dogs. However, her condition was dramatically transformed when, at the age of six, she heard some music by Bach on the radio. In Minou’s own words, she was “metamorphosed” by something akin to a miracle.11
She was raised in La-Guerche-de-Bretagne, a village in Brittany of some four thousand inhabitants, by her unmarried adoptive mother and her grandmother, and everything about her speaks of the obscure and unpropitious origins familiar from many of the nineteenth-century tales of “famous children.” After the “miracle” of the Bach episode she began to speak and made dramatic progress on all fronts. It was initially her musical talents that seemed to mark her out, and through family acquaintances she came to the attention of Lucette Descaves, who taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire and with whom she went on to have lessons. As the affair took off, Minou was reported in exaggerated terms by the women’s magazine Marie-France to be “Lucette Descaves’s most brilliant pupil,” although the view of the pianist herself was that “Minou is an interesting, undoubtedly talented child, but she is not a prodigy.”12 These reservations notwithstanding, Pascal Pia confidently predicted that she would become best known for her musical talents.
Precocious brilliance is most convincing when it comes in the measurable form of musical or mathematical performance. But, although she played and sang in public, Minou Drouet’s success was due to her way with words. In addition to writing poetry, she was also a prolific letter writer and it would seem that the impression she made on Lucette Descaves was principally through her letters. It was thanks to this correspondence that Minou came to the attention of Julliard. Lucette Descaves had shown Minou’s letters to Pasteur Vallery-Radot (grandson of Louis Pasteur), who was impressed, and he in turn passed them on to the publisher after meeting him at a dinner party. Unlike music (Roberto Benzi had perfect pitch) or mathematics, literary expression does not lend itself to precise measurement and quantification, and the evaluation of Minou’s talent was subject to the vagaries of literary judgment.
This inevitably produced its own anxieties: In dismissing Minou’s poems, was a future Rimbaud being overlooked? Or in praising their quality, was the critic making a fool of himself? Vallery-Radot, who declared Minou to be “quite simply a genius,” was adamant in his expression of the first of these views: “Would people have had the right to keep Rimbaud’s talent hidden? … I am convinced that time will consecrate the genius of this child as it consecrated Rimbaud.” André Rousseaux, writing in Le Figaro of 5 November, suggests that there is a generalized nervousness about genius that made people reluctant to give Minou her due: “[I]f we are dealing with a child of eight, the aversion to genius is unmasked. Everyone rushes in as if to look at an educated monkey or a five-legged monster. And then people take their revenge on genius by regarding the child as a monster.”13
The author of an article in Marie-France recognizes the difficulty of distinguishing between the youthful genius of a Mozart or a Pascal, which is a promise of greater things to come, and mere precocity, which offers nothing more than the “illusion of genius” and vanishes with adolescence. The journalist Madeleine Chapsal, writing in L’Express, acknowledges the embarrassment of the uncertainty: “We are now caught in the trap created by our own investigations, and obliged to admit that we are unable to reach a conclusion,” though she recognizes that, whatever the conclusion, Minou herself will be its principal victim.14 In December Elle called upon fourteen writers, from Jean Giono and Marcel Pagnol to Jean Paulhan, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre—as well as the nine-year-old daughter of the poet Jacques Prévert—to exercise that judgment. By then, however, the problem had taken on a different aspect. The debate was no longer about whether Minou Drouet was a genius in the making or a mere child prodigy. Instead the question was whether Minou Drouet was really the author of these poems. Could it be her mother? Putting the question in these terms made the phenomenon much easier to deal with.
TESTING FOR GENIUS AND COMPULSORY PERFORMANCE
André Breton, writing in the daily newspaper Paris Presse on 20 December, had no doubt that the poems had genuine literary value: “I should like to say that this has been a boost to true poetry which has even been royally served.” In his opinion, the quality of Minou Drouet’s poetry was such that it could not have been written by an eight-year-old child. Recalling the episode of the fake Rimbaud manuscript and the lessons it taught about the need to consider the internal evidence of the text itself, he asserted that the poems contained a “certain timbre of lived experience [which] a life that is still to be lived can under no circumstances affect.”15 Minou, in other words, was simply too young to be the author of the sentiments that her poems expressed, and Breton backed up this view by citing the “magisterial research” of the great French psychologist Piaget, notably La Représentation du monde chez l’enfant (The child’s conception of the world, 1926) and Le Jugement moral chez l’enfant (The moral judgment of the child, 1932). Piaget had spent a year working at a school founded by Alfred Binet and directed by Binet’s associate Théodore Simon, and it was while marking intelligence tests based on Binet’s model that he began to evolve his own theories of cognitive development in children. The scientifically based implication of Breton’s remark was that the real author of Minou’s poems could only have been Minou’s adoptive mother, though for him she was more of a “Sybil” than the fraudster that so many of the anti-Minou partisans accused her of being.
The test of Minou’s genius thus became an enquiry into the authorship of her work. But who had the expertise to judge? A self-styled psychotechnicienne wrote to the letters page of Le Figaro diagnosing serious mental and emotional problems in the child, and recommending medical treatment. She also blamed Mme Drouet for not protecting Minou from the “hoo-hah” that she had attracted. André Parinaud, who was himself a journalist (and at the time codirector of the literary review La Parisienne), consulted an expert in para-psychology, but otherwise those who carried out the various “tests” to which Minou was subjected were two or three graphologists and a large number of journalists. The graphologists came up with contradictory assessments, one claiming that Minou’s poems were unquestionably written in her mother’s hand, and another that the two handwritings expressed quite different characters: creative and imaginative in the case of Minou, repressed and conventional in the case of her mother.16 Both graphological verdicts, contradictory though they were, supplied grist to the mill of a psychological enquiry into the mother as opposed to the child, and there was much in Mme Drouet’s circumstances and character to provide material that would reward such scrutiny.
The gender dimension of Minou’s supposed genius is rarely raised directly in connection with her. One commentator told her to go back to her dolls, but in general the case for or against Minou’s genius does not seem to have been affected by considerations of her sex. Comparisons with Rimbaud never mention their sexual difference, although according to Lewis Terman’s 1930 enquiry into gifted children, it was only girls who were endowed with “exceptional literary ability in childhood,” boys having abandoned their former literary interests because they now have “so many other interesting things to do.”17 It is noteworthy that of all the publications that took an interest in the Minou Drouet case, at least two were women’s magazines—Elle and Marie-France—and Elle’s seven-page feature on Minou played a large part in launching the controversy in the first place. The gendering of the affair shows up most visibly in the portrait of Mme Drouet that emerges from the various accounts of the Minou phenomenon, and it contributes to making her the villain of the piece.
Her honorific “Madame” turned out to conceal the reality of her unmarried status, and she was not the widow she gave herself out to be. Nor was the story she originally told about Minou’s origins, whereby her parents had both been drowned at sea, true. These discrepancies—understandable though they were as attempts to protect Minou, who had not been aware of her adopted status—led to further allegations. At one stage Mme Drouet was suspected of being the real mother of Minou after giving birth to her illegitimately, an accusation she countered with the offer to submit herself to medical examination. She was also accused of ill-treating Minou, and a rumor started by a neighbor claimed that she had been seen beating the girl with a wet towel. Journalists who met Mme Drouet found her prone to exaggerate Minou’s talents, reporting her sayings with a barrage of sentences that began “Minou said….” On one occasion she was caught out attributing to Minou a remark that she herself had made about the statue of a saint looking as though it was covered in Ambre-Solaire sun oil.
Perhaps the most incriminating of all the accusations made against Mme Drouet was the discovery that she had had literary ambitions of her own when younger. A long poem in alexandrines written during the 1920s had failed to win a prize in the Jeux floraux (she may well have lost out to Sabine Sicaud, who was awarded the prize in 1925), and a story about a blind child had been turned down more recently by the publisher to which she had submitted it. Like Minou herself, she had also suffered from visual impairment and insisted that the origins of the story were entirely autobiographical.18 All this was used variously as evidence of Mme Drouet’s potential guilt in passing off her own work as that of Minou. If there was imposture, it was, to use the more precise French word, supercherie, active deception or fraud, and Mme Drouet was the culprit, a bad mother who abused her child for the gratification of her own frustrated literary ambitions.
Even in the more benevolent accounts, Mme Drouet was portrayed as the moving spirit behind Minou’s productivity. She was known as something of a clairvoyant and cartomancer, and apart from the aura of general dubiousness that this gave her, it led to the charge on the part of the writer and journalist Louis Pauwels that she had, as it were, taken possession of Minou. Describing Mme Drouet as “an unmarried provincial woman, full of complexes, repressed ambition and unhealthy nonsense,” Pauwels suggested that she failed to distinguish between herself and her adopted child, and manipulated Minou in order to fulfill her own poetic yearnings.19 In this view, the deception was unconscious and the issue was not so much imposture as something resembling witchcraft. André Breton’s description of Mme Drouet as a Sybil is in much the same vein.
Most of the accounts of the Minou Drouet affair end up—quite plausibly—pointing the finger at the girl’s adoptive mother. Parinaud himself, after his careful and exhaustive documentation of the affair, concludes that Minou’s poetry was the product of a kind of folie à deux, or what he calls “a special ‘psyche’ characterizing the relations between the child and her mother” and which took the form of an unconscious “collaboration” between the two. In her memoirs, Minou Drouet provides her own insights into her mother and is quite aware of their mutual indebtedness. She reports that her mother had never recovered from an unhappy affair with a married man, and that Minou’s success was a lonely woman’s attempt at revenge on the lover who had rejected her.20 Minou’s talents also offered her adoptive mother a way of escaping from the restrictions of a life that had failed to satisfy her intelligence and education. In fact, it was these attributes, exercised in the form of private lessons for local children at which the mute and retarded infant was invariably a silent presence, that had given Minou the literary education on which she was later able to draw for her own compositions. The main reproach Minou directs at her adoptive mother concerned the way in which she allowed her to be exploited as a celebrity in the years following the affair.
Even if it seems likely that, in the words of Jean-Max Tixier, the editor of Minou Drouet’s memoirs, there was something “suspect” in the relation between Minou and Mme Drouet, the point is not to get to the bottom of Mme Drouet’s psyche or to arrive at some verifiable “truth” about the relations between mother and child. For the urge to get to the bottom of things is itself symptomatic of the frantic desire for explanations that accompanied the anxieties provoked by Minou’s talents. After the weekly magazine France Observateur first raised doubts about the authenticity of the poems by asserting that “[i]t is impossible to believe that a more expert hand had not guided the fingers of the seven-and-a-half-year old child,” the literary journalist Robert Kemp called for a full investigation.21 Thereafter every journalist took it upon himself or herself to subject Minou to a series of more or less covert “tests” in an attempt to establish authorship of the poems.
Michèle Perrein, who wrote the original feature in Elle, thought that Minou recited her poetry as if she were rattling off a lesson learned by heart, and she found it suspicious that Minou was indifferent to the poetic sight of the sun setting over the sea and preferred to play with a friend’s poodle. Minou is shown up as not knowing the meaning of some of the words she uses in her poems, fails to recognize one of her own poems, and makes contradictory claims about whether she knows the work of Lamartine. In response to these suspicions, René Julliard and his wife invited Minou to stay—without her mother—for five days, during which time she was kept under constant observation and encouraged to write letters and poems to provide proof of her talents. In an attempt to clear her name and to put an end to the endless scrutiny, Minou later subjected herself voluntarily to a similar test under the auspices of the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (Society of authors, composers and music publishers), the organization responsible for overseeing the payment of rights to authors and composers.22 But the investigations had their own unstoppable momentum, and in a particularly gruesome episode, which she recounts in Ma vérité, the BBC shut her into a studio with pencil and paper, and set her a topic to write about as the camera rolled for the benefit of a panel of experts.
The effect of all these tests was to turn the child prodigy into a performer, and it does nothing so much as call to mind Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, premiered in Paris in January 1953, where Pozzo boasts of Lucky’s talent for “thinking” and, with Vladimir and Estragon as audience, brutally instructs him to think with the command: “Think, pig.” Minou was instructed to “create” in a very similar way. If Minou has genius, it needs to be authenticated; but authentication can only take the form of a performance, and, as was the case with Louise Colet’s story of Jacqueline Pascal composing her poems for the queen and the ladies at court, performance must always come as a response to demand.
In sum, the child prodigy becomes the child performer, and although Minou continued to write, her poetry soon took second place to her career as a celebrity. She appeared in a variety of venues, modeled children’s clothes for an upmarket label, and even starred in a film titled Clara et les méchants (Clara and the wicked men). Ma vérité includes photographs of her being received in the Vatican by the pope (in 1957) and having her hand kissed by Maurice Chevalier, whose rendition of “Thank Heavens for Little Girls” helped to make Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 film adaptation of Colette’s Gigi the box-office success that it became. In a sense she joined the dwarves and the bearded ladies mentioned by Georges Altmann (in fact on one occasion she appeared at the Cirque d’hiver with a large python), and she ended up looking less like the young Goethe than Shirley Temple—or even Jacques Inaudi, who had recently died at the age of eighty-three after a long career on the stage.
All this may appear to confirm the vacuity of the child prodigy, but if we are tracing the fortunes of the notion of genius, its mutation into the performances of the child prodigy must also track the language and the vehicles in which that mutation occurs. Although Proust had defended genius against its theorists,23 and although some commentators, like Altmann, harked back to an era of great literary geniuses, there is little sign of active interest in genius on the part of “serious” literature in the twentieth century, and it was a journalism associated with middle-brow culture and “collective curiosity” that picked up the notion. In defending—or even in suspecting—Minou Drouet, that culture was ignoring or indeed implicitly protesting against the difficulty of a high literary culture that, as Barthes would very soon indicate, had long since dispensed with any notion of genius.