Epilogue by Elisabeth Roudinesco

Marcourt, 5 March 1988

Beneath the snow, the village seems to have preserved intact the signs of its memory. There are no advertisement hoardings, no businesses and no neo lights. The history of the countryside seems frozen in motionless time, rather like the madness of the asylum, in which one could endlessly inscribe the unfolding of past events. Marcourt is an abandoned relic.

For household goods and everyday purchases, the inhabitants of Marcourt visit La Roche-en-Ardenne, an interesting medieval town which was rebuilt in 1944. The ‘Nature and Health’ park, designed for walking, is a made-to-measure green space, with Hungarian boars and convalescent deer. A placard refers to La Boverie. There is no sign of the White Cross Inn. In summer, this ill-defined area becomes a camping site. A handful of white caravans, sunk deep in the snow, remind one of holiday rituals, of hunting, fishing, swimming, and visits to the caves.

As I look at the guide-book, I reflect that the abduction of January 1791 did not happen here, but in the Parc de la Boverie, which is now the part of the town of Liege, to the south of the island watered by the Meuse. Xhoris is some dozens of kilometers away, and Stavelot  is further still. Apollinaire spent the summer here on 1899, at the Hotel du Mal Aime. What was he doing in  Théroigne’s country. Did he know of her existence? Had he read ‘Sisina’?

Olivier came with me to Marcourt, bringing his daughter, little Helene. The Journal des Enfants had asked her to write an account of her journey. Why Belgium? What relation was there to the Bicentenary?  Did the Revolution happen at Marcourt? Who was this ‘Tremoigne’? What were women’s rights? Are dotty people sent to asylums? The answers to the questions proved to be interlocking. I thought of my mother’s death, of the Union des femmes francaises, in which she was involved for a period, after the war. I thought of my aunt too, who had been a suffragette in the very early days.. I thought of my other aunt, who has emigrated from Romania, and who spoke several different languages. I thought of Francoise Dolto*, who was not afraid to die. I had never needed to be ‘feminist’, since all the women who had featured in my childhood had already been so. Fortunately. The women’s struggle has ended. The Revolution is over. I sent a postcard to my god-daughter Alice. I sent another card to my friend Elisabeth Badinter, who had insisted that I make the journey to Maracourt.

Had Theroigne had been schizophrenic or manic-depressive? The terminology matters little. Mourning and melancholia have no need of science. I feel I have invented everything, and that I have pondered over the celebration of a trompe l’oeil** bicentenary and of a nostalgia centenary.  Which have I been concerned with, Revolution or psychoanalysis? Had I been searching for Freud behind Pinel, and for Ferenczi after Mesmer? It would be claimed nowadays that this whole story had simply been a question of ‘neurones’ and of the power of the media.

The dominant memory at Marcourt was of the horrors of war. In September 1944, the patriots of the Belgian Resistance had pitched camp above Marcourt with a view of linking up with the American army, which was stationed at Hotten. At the crossroads, on the La Roche road, they attacked two enemy machine-gun carriers. The first was destroyed, but the second managed to escape. The first was destroyed, but the second managed to escape. For sometime afterwards, the head  of a decapitated soldier was to be seen in a sunken road, a grim symbol of this final struggle against barbarism. The German retaliation was terrible. Troops marched into the village and set fire to thirty-odd houses. Prisoners were burned alive in an old barn. Each year, on 9 September, friends and relatives gathered in a votive chapel, to remember the massacre.

Theroigne, the patriot of yesteryear, has never been associated with this celebration.

In Hodister, which is in the mountains, Noelle Mormont lives surrounded by her memories. She is a lovely old lady, a former teacher who is familiar with Theroigne’s story. In order to remind the inhabitants of their ancestors, she has written a chronicle, in which she describes the circumstances and deeds of the two local celebrities. Before Theroigne, there had been Evrard Mercurian, general of the Jesuit order. His surname encompassed Marcourt, which was derived from the Latin Mercurium and Mercury, god of journeys and of communication. It is a curious repetition: two children of this ‘mercurial’ village- the Jesuit Mercurian and the Amazon of Mericourt – had won glory by escaping and conquering the world in search of a new faith.

We took Noelle to visit Marcourt cemetery. I inspected every grave, hooping to find some inscription, date or portrait which might conjure up the presence of the Terwagnes. There was nothing, no shadow or shade, not even the slightest trace of this huge family. Even the dead disappeared.

The presbytery was inhabited by a private person, who rented it from the parish. Every Sunday, the only curé  in the area did his rounds, celebrating several masses on the same day. Those with a religious vocation are rare, and the faithful are elderly. Nevertheless, the church was in good repair, with a baroque choir, pious images and ultra-modern heating. The main door overlooks some waste ground, flanked by some huts serving as a tourist information bureau. With Rene Moureau as our guide, we visited the tawdry corrugated-iron structure in which the sympathetic man struggled to harvest a few fragments of local culture. He proudly showed us Anne-Josephe’s baptismal certificate, which was kept under glass. Suddenly, Helene asked where ‘Tremoigne’ had lived, where her house and that of her parents had been. It had been in that very spot, opposite the church, where the tourist information bureau now was.

The house had changed hands several times in the course if the nineteenth century until finally, in 1873, at the request of Houba, the curé , it had been demolished. He felt that it was attracting too many visitors. By effacing the last living race of the amazon, the priest sought to banish all record of the Revolution from human memory. He believed that archives were silent, forgot that a church document could restore Theroigne’s legal existence, in the very place where it has been destroyed. Did he perhaps dream at night of Michelet’s imprecations?  Did he fear the spread of a new contagion, coming from France, from Liege or rom the Brabant? Did he perhaps see the great Sabbath of the Bastille danced beneath his windows? History does not tell us. But, at Marcourt, aside from a baptismal certificate, Theroigne is nowhere to be found.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7oise_Dolto

** French for 'deceive the eye' is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface.