LE CHARIVARI
Translated from French
MAY 3, 1869
Le Charivari is not in the habit of writing obituaries. That is a reverent art form, and we pray at the altar of satire. But one of our own has fallen, and so we must heed the clarion call of duty. If we do not, all that will be left of our fallen sister will be stodgy lies and deliberate omissions. This will not do.
However, dear reader, do note that if thy sensibilities are prudish, thou might desire to stop reading right now, as we have written this obituary in our own custom, and we believe the deceased would have it no other way.
Gertrude Pompée had many more enemies than friends. She was crass, lewd, crude, and the worse offense of all, she was funny. She had also never once been seen in skirts, and she had the pile of permissions de travestissement to prove it. She had no tits to speak of, or if she did, she was very discreet about it. How old was Gertrude at time of death? She was gray-hair-at-the temples-and-parenthesis-about-the-mouth old. She had at least half of her original teeth. We the editors at Le Charivari declare that Gertrude Pompée died at the age of 47.
Gertrude Pompée was born and raised somewhere. Probably some crumbling medieval village in the Dordogne? Toothless mother, surly father, brother who preferred the company of sheep, all living in one dank room that smelled of straw and cow piss, that old fairy tale.
Perhaps it was the cow piss that shaped the life of young Gertrude.
Perhaps, as she felt the first wiry strands emerge from her upper lip, she thought to herself, “I shall devote my life to the human female’s right to piss anywhere a cow might!” Or perhaps it was her “weak bladder,” ah yes, the convenient bladder that allowed her the cross-dressing permit in the first place, which kept urination at the forefront of thought.
Gertrude’s very first caricature published in Le Charivari featured a woman in waistcoat, trousers, and top hat, standing at a public urinal between two similarly dressed men. She smiled saucily, and the caption read, “You don’t need an ‘outie’ to use an outhouse.”
It would be difficult to convey the sheer volume of outraged letters this paper received after the release of that issue. Naturally, we published another of her caricatures in the very next issue, the famous “Come, my pet” illustration of a rather comely bladder with eyes and legs leading a woman by collar and leash, as she looks forlornly over her shoulder at the bustling and exciting street life she must leave behind so as to be “chained to her chamber pot,” as Gertrude was so fond of saying.
It did not take long for Gertrude’s enemies to try and beat her at her own game. But alas, caricature will always be a weapon of the people—not the royals or their apologists, nor the bankers nor the landowners. And what happens when one tries to wield a powerful and unfamiliar weapon? One inevitably slices off one’s own pecker.
The illustration in question featured a likeness of Gertrude so amateurish that they were forced to label it with her name so she would be identifiable. She was dressed up like Marie Antoinette and proclaimed “Qu’il mangent de la pisse!” Which is both unoriginal and grammatically inaccurate as one does not eat piss, one drinks it. But we digress. We won’t be so petty as to name the newspaper, but this caricature in La Presse (or “La Pisse” according to Gertrude) did not subdue her as intended, but no, it merely spurred her on. And it gave her a grand idea.
“Women will never get anywhere if we cannot ‘go’ anywhere,” she said, standing at the pulpit of a meeting of the Ladies’ Radical and Liberal Association. “We strain our bladders today so that our daughters—well, not mine, but yours—might piss in public without once thinking of us and all the shit we’ve been through!” She received gasps instead of applause, but that was our Gertrude.
Gertrude was not a lover of “associations,” nor was she, except in the most medical of terms, a “lady.” She was “the president and sole member of the Gertrude Pompée Misanthropy Society.” But most of all, Gertrude refused to be serious. It is only when you don’t take rules so seriously, she said, that you can see how flimsy they are. To Gertrude, this was the only way the rules might someday be changed.
Her plan was to convince the owner of the Bon Marché to build women’s “retiring rooms” in his new store, complete with new flushing toilets. And if the owner said no, the plan was to dump urine out the windows and onto the street below.
We know how the story ended: Poor Gertrude was struck and killed by a speeding hansom cab on the rue de Sèvres at 1700 hours yesterday, the smell of urine everywhere. We do not believe this was an accident. Gertrude, as she might crudely say, “finally pissed off the wrong man.”
But we will not permit the last word of this story to be told by her enemies, so here is how we, editorial staff of Le Charivari and friends of Gertrude Pompée, one of the greatest caricaturists in all of France, imagine the adventure unfolded, in words not so far removed from how Gertrude herself would have described it:
Ah! Here she is, perched on the edge of her drawing table, hat on knee, boots on chair, unladylike cigarette between lips. She slides her hair behind her ears, shows us the damp cuffs of her shirt. “It’s piss,” she says gleefully. “We did it. We demanded an audience with M. Boucicaut and were refused. They know us, chums, and they consider us dangerous. They had no idea how dangerous we could be! But we did not let on. Quietly, demurely, like meek church mice did we pitter patter up to the third floor, where we stood to admire the fine tall windows. But then, all at once we whipped out our full “urinettes” and would you believe? Suddenly, it was raining a fine yellow mist on the rue de Sèvres! As you know, I would have loved to watch all those self-satisfied men below ruin their best beaver hats, but we could not tarry. We scattered to the wind like dandelion seed. We did not run, we did not attract attention—some of the Radical Ladies continued to peruse bolts of cotton and ribbon, and I disappeared behind a newspaper—La Pisse, in fact! How could I resist!—on a park bench. But now they will know that we mean to have our toilets! We carry our weapons with us, and we intend to use them to get what we want. Once we have toilets, gents, we can have anything. This is what frightens them the most, is it not?”
Why was this misanthropic, cross-dressing, unmarried, crude, crass, lewd, funny woman so concerned with the domestic toilette of the average Gallic female?
Gertrude would tell you it just was not fair. Of course it’s not fair, we might retort. The world is not fair, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
We see Gertrude smirk. Her surname dates back to the town in the shadow of that famously exploding mountain, the one that froze its citizens in time, in ash, to fulfill their destiny of being ogled by modern tourists. “No, chums, Pompeii was not fair,” she might say. “This is just some rich fools with muttonchops and lousy ideas.”
Touché, Gertrude. We won’t forget again: the future can only be won with small nudges, with a laugh and a wink and a bag of warm piss.