“My God! Why Was I Born?”

Traces of a Life

Official records together with Laurent-Pichat’s own writings enable us to sketch an outline of his life. “Léon Laurent” was born on July 11, 1823, to seventeen-year-old “Rosine Laurent.” ⁸ No father is recorded on the birth certificate, indicating that the child was illegitimate and that his father chose not to acknowledge him. The mother recorded a false name. As she admitted many years later, her name was not Rosine Laurent but Geneviève Leroi. ⁹ Geneviève’s occupation is not recorded on Léon’s birth certificate, but she gave her address as 90, rue St. Denis: an area known for poverty and prostitution. Born in the hinterland of the capital, she may have been one of the young domestic servants, seamstresses, and laundresses who came to the city and were numerous among the single mothers of the day. ¹⁰

By employing a pseudonym in 1823, Geneviève had disowned Léon as surely as his anonymous father had. Her use of a pseudonym suggests a desperate search for anonymity and a determination to survive the crisis of bearing a child outside wedlock. Geneviève’s hasty marriage to Louis-Achille Deslandes in October 1823, only three months after Léon’s birth, perhaps reflected similar intent, although the circumstances surrounding this marriage are unknown. ¹¹ The couple would have three children together. The first, born in 1829, was also named Rosine: we might wonder at Geneviève’s decision to give this child the name she had employed to camouflage her own misery. A son, named Louis-Achille like his father, was born in 1832, and a second daughter, Herminie, in 1839. ¹² Through her marriage Geneviève achieved respectability and modest comfort, eventually able to pass on substantial dowries to her legitimate children. ¹³

After a period with a nurse, Léon was placed in the care of a Madame Cointet, near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. He was later removed by a man he was instructed to call “godfather” and taken to live with him in central Paris. ¹⁴ That man, Étienne Pichat, was his biological father, as Léon would learn after Pichat’s death. A man of independent means, Pichat was fifty-one at the time of Léon’s birth and married to his second wife. ¹⁵ Léon was the child of an adulterous relationship, then, one in which the wealth disparity between the couple was probably as significant as the age gap.

In 1832, nine-year-old Léon was in boarding school in Saint-Mandé, east of Paris. He was baptized in the parish church there on January 28, recorded as the “son of Rosine Laurent.” Étienne Pichat now became officially his godfather. ¹⁶ Pichat, whose only legitimate child had died in 1830, made Léon his legal heir in September 1832. ¹⁷ French law expressly forbade legitimizing children of adulterous unions. It also forbade child adoption, but it did allow “unofficial guardianship.” This permitted a man aged over fifty with no legitimate descendants to become the unofficial guardian of a child under fifteen; if, after five years as guardian, that man seemed likely to die before the child reached legal majority (when adoption could take place), he could adopt the child in his will. ¹⁸ Using this means, Pichat adopted Léon in 1837 and he became legally “Léon Laurent-Pichat.” On Pichat’s death in 1838, his fortune of some 1.5 million francs passed to Léon. ¹⁹

Pichat’s action in adopting Léon was probably motivated by several factors. Perhaps he felt some guilt and wanted to behave honorably toward this child. Certainly, he was spurred on to find an heir because he had fallen out with his nephews who would have inherited if he had died without progeny. They challenged the will unsuccessfully. ²⁰ Pichat thus bequeathed to Léon his wealth and his name, the inheritance that a bourgeois father typically passed to a legitimate son. He thus saved his natural son from the pariah status that was reserved for such children at law. Yet Pichat was not a true “social father”—one who acted as a father—since he withheld from Léon the knowledge of their father–son link, a link that carried enormous familial and emotional significance. ²¹ Why Pichat concealed from Léon the truth about their relationship remains unclear. His feud with his family suggests that he had difficulty in sustaining relationships. Further, Léon’s recollection of his own childhood suggests that if Pichat felt affection for his son, he was unable to express it. ²² As a result, Léon did not experience his relationship with Pichat as a “familial” one. On Pichat’s death in 1838, Léon invested his desire to find a family in his mother.

Léon Laurent-Pichat’s personal papers suggest that he established contact with his mother and half-siblings in late 1844, a few months before the verse to his half sisters with which this article began. ²³ How he uncovered the family’s whereabouts is unknown, although Étienne Pichat’s papers may have provided valuable information. The death of Louis-Achille Deslandes in 1840, which left Geneviève Leroi a widow with three dependent children, may also have encouraged Léon to approach her. ²⁴ How did he first make contact? Recognizing the serious implications for his mother, did he write seeking her consent to his reappearance in her life? Did he turn up at her door, to the dismay of all? However that first contact was made, Laurent-Pichat gradually established a relationship with his mother and her family over the following years. On September 3, 1851, Geneviève Leroi legally recognized him as her son, withdrawing the fictitious name that she had used in 1823. ²⁵ She subsequently moved into his apartment, where she would die in 1863. ²⁶

Laurent-Pichat made a career as a writer, republican activist and, from 1875 until his death in 1886, Life Senator. ²⁷ Analysis of subsequent events lies outside the scope of this article, but his personal life remained unorthodox. He never married, but in 1856 he himself became the father of an illegitimate daughter, whose mother was never identified. Laurent-Pichat recognized his daughter and named her Geneviève, like his mother, affirming her place within the family. ²⁸ If Geneviève Leroi had been unable (or unwilling) to keep her illegitimate son in 1823, she now helped that son to raise his own illegitimate daughter as part of the family. Rosine would assume that role on their mother’s death. Like the first generation, then, the second generation failed to abide by the legal norms governing the family. Yet it emulated the idealized sentimental family, becoming a close unit bound by strong emotional ties.

The Family Archive

After Laurent-Pichat’s death, his writings were preserved by the women close to him—his daughter, his half sister, and his granddaughter—in an archive whose contents span three generations of the extended family. ²⁹ The women saved few of their own writings, and no correspondence survives between Léon and his mother or his half brother. Despite these gaps, we are left with a very extensive collection of his personal writings—diaries, family letters, travel accounts, records of his political activities—as well as a corpus of his poetry, much never published, which is often deeply personal.

Among this collection of intimate writings, a series of poems including a life story written in verse are the focus of this article. ³⁰ Composed between March 1845 and September 1851, they deal with the period between his first encounter with the family in late 1844 and his mother’s official recognition of her illegitimate son. How complete this collection is we do not know. Nor do we know how these writings intersected with personal contact. Taken together, however, they reveal the difficult process by which this relationship unfolded and make explicit the intense emotion associated with that encounter.

Laurent-Pichat’s use of verse, rather than prose, to communicate with his family is most unusual. It reflects in part his ambition to be a poet. In the account of his life, he recalled an interest in words and wordplay from a young age; his earliest surviving poem dates from 1838, when he was fifteen. ³¹ From that age, verse was his chosen medium for examining personal questions and exploring his emotions, though he also employed it for reflecting on social and political questions. The poetic form simultaneously legitimized and contained the overt display of emotion. This made it particularly appropriate for writings intended for the family, a quintessentially sentimental unit. Indeed, once part of his mother’s family, Laurent-Pichat regularly wrote verse to mark important moments like birthdays, marriages, and the births of children; this became a family ritual. At the same time, the meter and rhyme required by verse provided structure and discipline to the writing. The demands of maintaining those structures created distance from the subject matter, channeling and containing the expression of emotion. Laurent-Pichat may have found it easier to discuss intensely sensitive aspects of his life in verse rather than in prose.

The verses Léon wrote in his quest to join his family resemble personal letters. They are written for and to another, usually the elder of his two half sisters, Rosine. They share the letter’s fundamental aim of expressing the desire for attachment, the aspiration to be loved and accepted by their recipient. They signify a relationship or the desire for one. ³² While there are no extant verses from his sisters in return, the verses also evoke the reciprocity that grounds the epistolary genre. ³³ In reaching out with emotion to their recipients, they sought a response just as letters did. Given that Laurent-Pichat was in physical contact with his family at the time of writing, he likely received an oral response, an affirmation of their receipt and perhaps even an acknowledgment of their sentiments. He certainly received an epistolary response, since he mentions letters from his sisters in one of his poems. ³⁴ Léon’s explicit purpose in writing these verses—to win acceptance by his maternal family—is often painfully clear. But, like letters, these verses are not so much transparent representations of Laurent-Pichat’s feelings as devices to advance his cause.

Seeking a Family

The poems through which Léon Laurent-Pichat engaged with his maternal family were addressed to his half sisters: what initiated these poems, and why to his sisters, he never explains. Perhaps his mother had welcomed or at least accepted him, leaving her legitimate children to be won over; perhaps he approached his sisters as potential allies in his quest for acceptance.

Laurent-Pichat’s verses reflected the emotional intensity and passionate sensitivity that marked the poetry of the Romantic era. ³⁵ They perform intense “emotion work,” making a claim for his acceptance into his mother’s family and also expressing his fear of rejection. ³⁶ Presenting himself as a lonely, suffering individual, a kindly older brother, Léon won his sisters’ sympathy, to his relief and delight. ³⁷ He wrote in mid-1845: “Heartfelt thanks, my dearly-loved children,/For your letters! Thank you! […]/Your words, strewn with joy and regret,/Have poured sweetness and perfume on my heart.” ³⁸ His enthusiastic response to their letters in turn solicited further welcoming gestures on their part. Through this emotion work, Léon advanced what would be an ongoing cause in his verses: his claim to the identity of son and brother, with a rightful place in the family. In making this case, he both exposed his insecurity and staked his claim to be accepted as a lovable and worthy person.

Léon’s desire for inclusion in a loving family relationship with his sisters reflected not only his emotional neediness and sense of isolation but also the widespread contemporary adulation of the sentimental family, idealized as a haven of affection and intimacy. ³⁹ Léon had apparently witnessed such happy domesticity with the Chevreau family, where he boarded, along with other pupils, from about the age of nine. ⁴⁰ He also observed there the warm relations between siblings that were an integral part of the affectionate family model. ⁴¹ For a child raised outside his family, deprived of parental affection as he claimed to be, the joy of later discovering his own family was enhanced by this model. Léon embraced his sisters all the more readily because he saw the possibility of becoming part of a family like the Chevreau family, whose happiness he had envied. ⁴² He seemed to believe that acceptance into his own family would ensure his happiness, undoing the rejection and exclusion that his illegitimacy had created.

The emotional vocabulary of Léon’s verses reflected the idealized family model that he admired, evoking “love” and “friendship” and making many references to the heart, the symbol of affection. He looked to his sisters for signs of love and friendship in return. ⁴³ But this vocabulary did not so much describe an established reality as express his aspirations for, perhaps even his fantasies about, an emerging relationship. After all, when he first claimed to love his sisters, they were complete strangers to him. Yet that claim indicates the powerful cultural dynamic that underpinned the emotions of these exchanges, at least from Léon’s perspective. Raised as an orphan (as he later expressed it), but having witnessed the display of family affection, Léon felt or desired to feel fraternal affection for his siblings: he knew that love was the emotion that brothers and sisters were expected to feel for each other. ⁴⁴ How his sisters expressed or imagined this relationship remains unknown since their replies to his overtures are lost. But they were immersed in the same culture. Even if Léon exaggerated the enthusiasm with which they welcomed him, his ongoing relationship with them and the fact that they later preserved his verses suggest that their welcome to this newfound brother was genuine.

Laurent-Pichat’s vision of belonging to an idealized family was also apparent in images of his sisters as his moral compass. The idea of woman as moral force pervaded European culture, from Catholic to socialist circles, in the 1830s and 1840s. That concept juxtaposed woman’s moral superiority with man’s social and political authority, justifying the distinctive social roles assigned to the sexes—in theory, at least—in the bourgeois family. ⁴⁵ Laurent-Pichat drew upon such notions to make the case that his membership of the family would have moral benefits for him. An untitled poem dated March 1846 evoked the figure of the “guardian angel,” the guide of man: “These protective beings who live in our souls,/Are sweet creatures, sisters or mothers, women /[…]/This ever-vigilant eye always watching over us/Causes us to do good! It is our safeguard!” ⁴⁶

It followed, then, that the moment of finding his sisters was, for Léon, a moment of salvation that raised him from “abandonment” to security, overturning the effects of his illegitimacy. His well-being was assured, Léon asserted, now that he could count on his “two guardian angels”: “You watch over me always, I see you at all times!/I search your eyes; I listen to you voice!/And observing your worried or smiling face/My soul, like a confident pilgrim, sets its course.” ⁴⁷ If this poem was intended to make an irrefutable case for his acceptance by the family, it might also have been construed, even if unintentionally, as critical of his mother, who had failed that early test of womanly virtue.

Like earlier poems that laud the friendship offered by his sisters, the above poem, written some eighteen months after his first encounter with them, has an optimistic tone. Yet it is far from certain that the reunion of Léon Laurent-Pichat with his mother’s family proceeded without difficulty. Three years later, in April 1849, he penned an emotional plea for acceptance into the family in a long, four-part poem addressed to his sister but probably intended for all his siblings. ⁴⁸ This poem suggests that Léon’s arrival had turned family relations upside down and was still creating ructions more than four years later.

The poem begins by highlighting the suffering of his mother, which may suggest that family attitudes were not always sympathetic to her. He set out to defend her, painting a positive and admirable picture that was perhaps intended to influence his siblings. “I, who am [my mother’s] misfortune, I will reveal her secret!” he wrote. For Léon to identify himself as the “misfortune” of his mother highlighted that, while the mother/child relationship was lauded as a privileged bond, the single mother was a social outcast, like her child. Léon’s reappearance some four years earlier had exposed the secret of her premarital pregnancy, reopening an old wound. The “secret” that Léon now revealed was the pain that she continued to endure silently due to her act of maternal generosity: by not turning Léon away, she had sacrificed her own happiness for his sake. This act made amends for her initial rejection. Laurent-Pichat expressed his love and gratitude to his mother, his “goddess”: “my heart is indeed a chapel dedicated to her,” he wrote. ⁴⁹

In this poem, the illegitimate son assumed responsibility for the suffering that his appearance, first in 1823 and again in 1844, had caused his mother: “Vampire children” like him, he wrote, “[have] no place in the world—and fortune/Does an injustice to someone if it gives them one.” ⁵⁰ He would later express guilt about his relationship with his father too: “If I had loved him[,] if I had/Looked him in the eye, instead of trembling before him,/It would have been a pardon; if he had said to himself: he loves me!/He would have died content.” ⁵¹ Laurent-Pichat took upon himself the guilt and blame associated with his illegitimacy. He expressed a sense of worthlessness from a young age. As a fifteen-year-old, he had imagined his guardian angel pointing him out to God and declaring: “That’s him, the one who cries/Whatever one says, at whatever time/Awake or in bed!/God who knows everything, should he die?” ⁵² Léon was perhaps not exaggerating when he declared to his sister that he felt an “endless remorse” and would only acquire “true happiness […] when my happiness could one day be called ours!” ⁵³

In these verses, Laurent-Pichat thus drew attention to his own plight, as well as that of his mother, and cried out for sympathy: “[My mother’s] first tear was for my life—and fell/On my cradle; why did it not fall on my tomb?/Very often, like Job, the wretched one,/I have repeated: My God! Why was I born?” ⁵⁴ Unlike the biblical figure Job, this rich young man had not become a beggar covered in sores. Indeed, his mother had ensured him a privileged life by surrendering him to the care of his wealthy father. As a single mother faced with Pichat’s financial resources and paternal power, she had little choice. But the currency of the family, like the currency of poetry, was emotion, and Laurent-Pichat’s poetry suggests that he had experienced his mother’s action in surrendering him to his father, however well-intentioned or unavoidable, as rejection. ⁵⁵

Addressing the family situation directly, Laurent-Pichat urged a new beginning, for their mother’s sake: “Let’s leave the past there—with no reproaches!” he wrote, “So that in seeing our harmony our mother might smile!” ⁵⁶ Had he himself expressed “reproaches” to the mother who had surrendered him? Did his half-siblings level reproaches at the interloper who had suddenly reappeared in his mother’s life, or at their mother herself? While the siblings were to gain financially from acquiring a wealthy half brother, Laurent-Pichat’s wealth perhaps created some tension in family ranks given the disparities in their fortunes. ⁵⁷ In 1851, while Laurent-Pichat was living in central Paris on the rue Jacob, on the Left Bank of the Seine in the aptly named Quartier de la Monnaie, his mother and her family lived on the outskirts of the city in the rue Samson, near the semirural Butte-aux-Cailles. ⁵⁸

Significantly, Léon never mentions his half brother, Achille (who was seventeen when this poem was written). Perhaps Achille had more difficulty than his sisters in welcoming this previously unknown half brother, who was a competitor for his position as head of the family. Achille would also have realized what the appearance of this illegitimate son implied about his mother, which, given the moral codes of the day, may have been troubling for him. Léon may have struggled with jealousy, too, as he sought an accommodation with the younger brother, the legitimate son, who had ostensibly replaced him in his mother’s affections. In the light of this poem in particular, Laurent-Pichat’s entry into his mother’s family appears to have been difficult, at least at first, for all concerned.

Finding a Sister

The depth of emotion that Laurent-Pichat invested in his sisters was clearly a sign of his own emotional neediness, but it also reflected the prevailing cult of siblinghood that had seen brothers and sisters move to the center of the emotional “family romance” in the early nineteenth century. ⁵⁹ Laurent-Pichat’s poems sometimes addressed his sisters jointly, but Rosine was probably their true focus from the beginning: Herminie was only five years old when the poems began in 1845; Rosine was fifteen. Laurent-Pichat was not unique in seeking a special relationship with Rosine: devoted brother–sister couples were many in this period. The close bonds between William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Honoré and Laure de Balzac, Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Edgar and Blanche Quinet, Bettine and Clemens Brentano, for instance, are well known. ⁶⁰ The brother–sister relationship was viewed as the perfect form of complementarity that united male and female as mirror images, the “like unlike.” ⁶¹

The relationship between Léon and Rosine shared some of the characteristics of these close sibling pairs. For instance, just as many sibling-couples shared artistic pursuits, Léon envisaged a literary partnership in which Rosine would provide illustrations for his verses. But while Rosine was a keen sketcher and watercolorist, she declined (or, only eighteen years of age at the time, was not permitted by her mother to proceed) and this project never came to fruition. “This would have been our album,” he wrote in 1847: “You with your brush and I with my pen,/We would have expressed on the white paper/Our dreams and our thoughts,/Painted and rhythmical creations [choses]/[…]/It would have been charming, I assure you!” ⁶²

The following year, however, in mid-1848, the handwriting in the archive of poetry suddenly changes: it becomes neater, finer, and more rounded and sometimes has corrections in Laurent-Pichat’s hand. ⁶³ This new handwriting is consistent with the elegant style expected of young women at a time when more utilitarian standards were set for men. ⁶⁴ While it is impossible to be sure whose hand it is, Rosine was the person most likely to have made the fair copy of Léon’s verses, and the script is compatible with the few extant examples of her handwriting. ⁶⁵ Perhaps theirs was a literary partnership after all, but one in which Rosine occupied a modest “feminine” role behind the scenes.

The bonds between brothers and sisters in the early nineteenth century were often quite passionate. Literature from that period exhibits a host of “intense [examples of] brother–sister love often bordering on incest.” ⁶⁶ A similar erotic intensity sometimes marked real-life relationships. Historians have linked this efflorescence of sibling passion to the increasing shift toward marriages based on attachment: affectionate and expressive relations between siblings, fostered in the family, were vital for imbuing children with an emotional style suitable for such relationships, although desire was meant to be transferred to a suitable other. ⁶⁷

The relationship between Léon and Rosine differed from this pattern. They were strangers when they first met in 1844. Learning that they were siblings, they embarked upon a relationship that was associated in their culture with intense emotion, but not having been raised together, they shared no familial past that constructed and constrained their relationship as that of brother and sister. Their encounter was first and foremost, therefore, an encounter between a young man and a young woman, aged twenty-one and fifteen, which gave it a particularly powerful erotic charge. ⁶⁸

Rosine left no extant letters to Léon to document her youthful emotions. By 1848, however, the intensity of Léon’s attachment to his sister was unmistakable. A poem written in February that year, addressed to this unnamed “sister,” leaves no doubt that he had Rosine in mind. The context may have been the publication in 1847 of Laurent-Pichat’s first sole-authored collection of verse, Libres Paroles, which, to his disappointment, the critics ignored. His untitled poem of 1848 imagined the future—“we shall be old then, my dearly beloved”—when he had tired of his vain efforts to win fame and renown:

This imagined sister compared Laurent-Pichat favorably to Shakespeare and Dante: “There is not one, my friend, who surpasses you!” Smothering his brow with kisses, she would declare: “You are the first and the only one in my heart!” The disdain of the critics, exclusion from the Pantheon, would matter not at all: “I have been baptized by a sister’s kiss!/[…]/I have made my Pantheon in the heart of a woman!” ⁶⁹

Léon was clearly hungry, not only for Rosine’s approval and praise but also for her love. She had the power to console him as well as the power to make him feel worthwhile. Reflecting, seven months later, on the four years since he had encountered his family, Léon again singled out Rosine as the one who had transformed his life: “Indeed, I had not lived before that moment!/I was like a flower […]/That requires the necessary ray of sunlight in order to open!/[…]/My soul blossomed beside you—and my life/Was awakened and delighted beneath your gaze.” “The dream that my soul had long pursued/Took bodily form,” he added, “and since that day it lives!” ⁷⁰

The language of attachment in early-nineteenth-century Western culture was radically different from our own. Passionate declarations of friendship were common, not only between heterosexual couples but also between women and between men. ⁷¹ Indeed, in 1844, shortly before he first met Rosine, Léon had expressed equally passionate sentiments to his close friend and quasi-sibling, Henri Chevreau, with whom he had grown up in Saint-Mandé:

By 1848, however, when Léon penned his verses to Rosine, his friendship with Henri was unraveling over their political differences. The Revolution in February established a provisional Republic. But Henri supported Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and, having risen to become Prefect of the Ardèche, was undeterred by Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1851 and the establishment of the Second Empire (in which he would hold high office). Léon, a republican, regarded Henri’s choice as a self-interested defection. ⁷³ If Henri had filled an emotional void for Léon in adolescence, Rosine appeared in his life as friend and confidante just as his break with Henri left him emotionally bereft.

Creating a Past

After nearly six years of growing acquaintance, the final poem in the series that Laurent-Pichat addressed to Rosine began: “I am going to tell you the story of my childhood” (l’enfance de ma vie). This life story, thirty-six pages long, unfolded in irregular installments from May 20, 1850 until June 29, 1851. ⁷⁴ The narrative did not name Rosine as its intended reader, but Laurent-Pichat addressed her—“my sister”—several times in the text and, echoing the epistolary form, he wrote as though in dialogue with her. ⁷⁵ Indeed, given the episodic nature of this text, we might wonder about the face-to-face encounters that punctuated its production. Further, this life-narrative had elements of the love letter where, in exposing the self, the writer appeals for affirmation and love in return. ⁷⁶ Approaching the family some six years earlier, Laurent-Pichat had insisted: “What does it matter who I am?” Now, in a sign of developing trust and security, he set out to reveal himself fully and deliberately: “My sister, I will tell you my whole secret.” (Ma sœur, vous recevrez ma confiance entière). ⁷⁷ In confiding his personal story to Rosine, Laurent-Pichat at once unveiled his neediness and implicitly appealed for her acceptance and love.

Life-narratives typically construct a version of the self for the reader, as Laurent-Pichat did, and his self-narration contained features found in many such accounts. His life story was, again, unusual in being composed in verse. But it was typical in claiming veracity and entering an “autobiographical pact” with the reader: “Why would I lie?” he asked. ⁷⁸ His account also reflects the vicissitudes of memory and the nonsequential manner in which memory operates. It moved forward and back in time haphazardly, as memory jogged memory. ⁷⁹ Further, he realized that his memories were shaped by the emotions with which they were associated: “The heart has certain procedures/For linking earlier events to present events,/And something, which often might seem misplaced,/Quite naturally comes back to mind […]” at an unexpected time. ⁸⁰ Léon’s account, like other such narratives, interwove memories with retrospective interpretation of those memories, as he sought to make sense of his life and give it coherence. ⁸¹ Rather than being confined to his childhood, then, the narrative linked the events of his childhood to his reunion with his maternal family.

Laurent-Pichat’s approach to writing his life reflected the narrative practices of the day, when life-writing was influenced by the “Romantic quest narrative” of the novel. ⁸² It was constructed as a quest to reach his goal of acceptance into his maternal family, which he believed would bring self-fulfillment and peace. Addressing his sister/reader, Léon invited her to “remake” (refaire) the “sinuous path” of his life with him: “From the first step, my sister, until the last,/Before your coming, after meeting you,/[…]/You will see […]/What this child was like who became your brother!” ⁸³ This statement—and indeed the project—was already a claim to family membership: it linked “sister” and “brother,” overriding the legal and social realities that complicated their relationship. More than that, it revealed his desire to present himself to his sister in a particular light, to walk her through his life’s journey and shape the impression that she received, and thus to evoke her sympathetic emotional response. ⁸⁴

In his life story, Laurent-Pichat constructed a series of narrative lines that traced his journey from illegitimate child, excluded from the family and lacking parental love, to the present, as he came “home” to his maternal family. The first narrative presented his childhood as one of misfortune and sorrow: “I was born alone and sad […]/I came into the world—poor illicit little runt, germ of despair and seed of fear/[…]/useless and cursed—like an alien star/Born in the heavens to disrupt everything!” ⁸⁵ Although attributing to himself emotions that, as a newborn, he could not have experienced, he captured dramatically the anguish surrounding the birth of an illegitimate child. Laurent-Pichat intermingled the voices of child and adult as he recounted his past to his sister. But the voice of the hurt child—unwanted at birth, ill-treated, and deprived in childhood—resonated across the text as he appealed for Rosine’s compassion. He was not only a “poor illicit little runt” but a “poor little urchin,” a “poor little boy”; “the innocent kid [marmot]—poor little subject of a great fury.” ⁸⁶

Yet other elements of the narrative undercut this negative picture. He portrayed a loving environment at Madame Cointet’s place. ⁸⁷ Indeed, he recalled the trauma of his removal from her care: “I cried at leaving my humble abode!/I sobbed and rebelled! [j’étais indocile]/With my little hands I tried to hold on/To the skirts of the old woman; she was my rock/And I clung instinctively to her […].” ⁸⁸ With this removal, he began to realize that he did not have a family like other children’s families. But Madame Cointet and her family had expressed their love for him: this was what he remembered and reported.

The life story then presented a second narrative: that of parental love denied or withheld from him, a narrative potentially as powerful as the first in soliciting his sister’s sympathy and defining his quest for family. He recounted, firstly, being visited at Madame Cointet’s place by a mysterious woman, unknown to him. “Enveloped in veils” and “frightened of everything,” she was clearly anxious not to be seen or identified. Distancing himself from the life narrative, Laurent-Pichat immediately inserted an imaginary scene about a lonely child visited in secret by his mother, implying, therefore, that this mysterious visitor was his own mother. ⁸⁹ Was this a “true story,” one that combined hazy memories of childhood with his mother’s own account, more recently heard? After all, if Geneviève Leroi had reached an arrangement with Pichat to surrender Léon to him in exchange, perhaps, for some financial benefit, she risked a great deal by breaking the terms of the agreement. She might well have feared discovery. Alternatively, was this scene a device for defending his mother (as in the earlier poem) by imputing to her admirable and courageous behavior? Or was it a case of wishful thinking, Laurent-Pichat’s own fantasy that his mother had indeed not abandoned him or at least had done so only under duress? Significantly, this mysterious woman and her female companion were loving and affectionate toward him: “[…] lifting me in their arms,/They would raise my forehead to a tender mouth/Saying words I could not hear!” ⁹⁰ With hindsight, the adult Laurent-Pichat recognized these secretive words and gestures as signs of love: “When I was small I did not understand/The value of a kiss that cost so many steps!” ⁹¹ But this second narrative was predominantly one of maternal love that could not be declared openly and expressed Léon’s longing for that love.

Laurent-Pichat’s story of love suppressed and denied to him then focused on his father: “It was only after his death that I learned/That my father was dead and that he was my father!” His father’s emotional response to him, he writes, was conflicted: “[…] he found in me/Both his accuser and his savior!” ⁹² Léon was living evidence of Pichat’s fault, and yet he was also the heir Pichat desired in order to prevent his nephews from acquiring his wealth. ⁹³ He was a substitute child, adopted to replace Pichat’s legitimate child on her death. By Léon’s account, he bore the malice of the housekeeper, who plotted to supplant him as Pichat’s heir with her own daughter. ⁹⁴ While his father had claimed him, therefore, Léon declared that he had not found a family or a secure home brimming with affection in being reunited with his father. Instead, the home he shared with his father was presented as dangerous, even murderous, for a vulnerable and bewildered child.

A real home, Laurent-Pichat insisted, was one in which he was loved and cherished, and that home was with his maternal family. Having been accepted by his mother and sisters, a third and final narrative presents Laurent-Pichat’s lifelong quest for belonging within that family as accomplished:

This life story was intended to justify Laurent-Pichat’s irruption into a family in which he had been effectively unknown and to establish his right to belong in that family, which was, for him, a New World, a Promised Land. He defended his quest as natural: it was simply a matter of “instinct” to seek out one’s family; it required no ulterior motives. With his acceptance into his family, his search for belonging was ended, and like a tree transplanted into good soil, he would finally flourish. ⁹⁶ Not for the first time, however, we are left to wonder at the absence of his brother Achille—eighteen as Léon was writing in 1850—from his portrait of the “happy family.”

Events in 1851, whether they were intended to or not, served to cool the intense sibling relationship that had developed between Léon and Rosine. In June, Léon traveled to London with three male friends to visit the Exhibition. He kept a journal of that trip, and a handful of letters addressed to his mother and his “dear sister Rosine” have survived. ⁹⁷ By that time, plans were apparently afoot to find a husband for Rosine, now aged twenty-one. She made a respectable marriage to Louis-Amédée Beaujean, professor at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, on November 27, 1851. ⁹⁸ The circumstances surrounding the choice of this spouse, and what Léon knew of the marriage plans, are unknown, although his substantial contribution to Rosine’s dowry surely helped make her an attractive wife. But the sequence of poems by which Léon had reached out to Rosine ended abruptly, a day after his return from England. ⁹⁹ Their relationship was now placed—by themselves or by others—on a different footing. Léon and Rosine would nevertheless retain deep bonds of affection throughout their lives. In 1863, the siblings—Laurent-Pichat, with his daughter, Geneviève, and Rosine, with her husband, Amédée, and their daughter Clémence—would establish a joint household, where the two girls were raised like sisters. ¹⁰⁰

Conclusion

Léon Laurent-Pichat’s private writings testify to the long-term social and emotional impact of illegitimacy among the bourgeoisie where family ties carried enormous social, cultural, and personal weight. In many respects, his is a success story: left a fortune by his natural father, he found and was accepted by his birth mother, and became close to his half sisters, especially to Rosine, a lifelong friend and companion and effectively a mother to his daughter. His personal writings nevertheless illustrate the limits of his success in personal terms: it did not remove the pain of being born illegitimate or the sense of being denied by his father and initially rejected by his mother. These events left a deep wound that probably never healed entirely, and his verses expressed the grief and longing that were the emotional consequences of his sense of rejection. Indeed, many years later, Laurent-Pichat issued an emotional appeal to his own illegitimate daughter: “I want to be loved; I believe I am worthy of affection; I regret not being spoiled—and my fault is to have said so!” ¹⁰¹

Family was critical as a source of identity and belonging among the bourgeoisie, and Laurent-Pichat’s desire for family reveals a great deal about the expectations of bourgeois culture. He created in his poetry an imaginary family resembling the cultural ideal of affectionate domesticity, a family in which he was accepted and embraced. Indeed, in his desire for acceptance, he transformed the imagined affectionate family into an idyll: a paradise, a Promised Land where happiness reigned. Whatever personal needs underlay this imagining, it also revealed the cultural power of the domestic ideal and the extent to which the emotional apparatus of normative family life was, and is, culturally acquired.

If the law was clear about the exclusion of illegitimate children from the conjugal family, Laurent-Pichat’s experience raises questions about bourgeois responses to illegitimate children in practice. Was there invariably an “indelible taint” on the natural child? ¹⁰² Could that taint be removed or at least ignored? Léon’s experience suggests that it could. Certainly, his wealth and the fact that his mother’s husband was dead facilitated his quest to join his maternal family. ¹⁰³ On the other hand, his initially difficult relationship with Achille confirms that legitimate children could pose a significant stumbling block, though this particular fraternal relationship would improve with time.

But Laurent-Pichat’s success demonstrates that, in certain circumstances at least, bourgeois families could heed the call of sentiment, integrating illegitimate offspring despite laws and customs excluding them, and despite prevailing moral prescriptions. In Laurent-Pichat’s case, both parents behaved in more humane ways than was required by law. Not only, as Étienne Pichat’s example shows, did they use the law creatively to pursue their own intentions for an illegitimate child, but they also deployed notaries—archetypal instruments of bourgeois family management—to achieve their purposes. Whether or not Étienne Pichat was driven by affection, or by a sense of personal honor, to raise his illegitimate son, he at least offered financial support. Geneviève Leroi, having become a widow of modest but independent means, was finally able to acknowledge her maternal status and offer the emotional support she had been unable to provide as a vulnerable seventeen-year-old.

As Fuchs has noted, the law lagged behind social attitudes and many men did assume paternity when not obliged to, offering financial and emotional support to their illegitimate children. ¹⁰⁴ When faced with the shame of an illegitimate birth, some bourgeois families no doubt did give priority to preserving family honor, even at the cost of heartlessness. But we may nevertheless wonder how many intimate family dramas were quietly and discreetly resolved, if not painlessly, at least with compassion.