A Parisienne in Chicago: Uncovering Madame Grandin’s Personal Journey

Guest blogger Mary Beth Raycraft

My recent translation of Madame Léon Grandin’s A Parisienne in Chicago, Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition, turned out to involve much more than simply rendering the author’s conversational tone into English. From the very beginning of the translation process, I was charmed by Madame Grandin’s witty observations and sketches of American life. As I translated her spirited reactions to American women, marriage, and education, I couldn’t help but wonder about her personal life in late 19th-century Paris and Chicago. So began a year long hunt for clues to her identity. Complicating my task was the fact that she had published her book under her married name, Madame Léon Grandin. Though it seemed strange that a woman who had managed to get her book published in late 19th-century Paris had chosen to hide behind her husband’s identity, at least his name gave me a starting point for my research.

Since Léon Grandin was a well-known Parisian sculptor who had worked on the Columbian Fountain for the Chicago Exposition, I had no trouble finding his obituary in a Paris library. Thrilled to learn that he was buried in the Cimétière Montparnasse, I headed to the cemetery under a gray Paris sky. Although I had hoped that his wife’s grave would be adjacent and that her name would appear on the gravestone, that was not the case as the engraving “famille Grandin” seemed to mock my efforts to uncover Madame Grandin’s identity. The next stop was the Paris Archives where I requested a copy of their marriage certificate in the hope that I would at least discover Madame Grandin’s first and maiden names. I was not very optimistic about gleaning any other information as women have not had a particularly easy time of it in the archives. As Linda Colley points out in the introduction to her remarkable biography The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, A Woman in World History, “women seldom left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event.” Fortunately, Madame Grandin did indeed find herself in a situation that left its trace on the official records.

Their marriage certificate revealed that Marie Lédier married Léon Grandin on November 18, 1884 in Paris. She was twenty years old at the time and was employed as an elementary school teacher. The fact that she had taught school in France made clear why this twenty eight year old school teacher had been so interested in visiting American schools during her visit to Chicago in 1892. The most interesting tidbit of all, however, came in a handwritten scrawl on her birth certificate which indicated that she had remarried in New York in December 1901. It quickly became clear that two parallel plots were at work in her story. While Madame Grandin was commenting on relationships between men and women in Chicago, her own marriage was apparently starting to unravel. Less than two years after her return from Chicago, she left both her husband and France behind. A ship manifest in the Ellis Island records revealed that she returned to New York in July of 1895 in the company of a young French man named Alexandre Ferrand and was expecting a child. It turned out that I had been looking in a cemetery on the wrong continent, as she died and was buried on Staten Island in December 1905 at the age of forty one. In the end, the back story of Madame Léon Grandin’s cross-cultural journey through late 19th-century Paris, New York, and Chicago revealed itself to be every bit as intriguing as her memoir. Struck by the relative freedom of American women in late 1890’s Chicago, Marie Grandin made the decision to leave both her husband and France and live out the rest of her life in America, making her trip to Chicago not simply a tourist’s excursion but a decisive moment in her personal journey.

Mary Beth Raycraft teaches French at Vanderbilt University and is the translator of A Parisienne in Chicago, Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition, (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Read more about A Parisienne in Chicago, Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition at www.aparisienneinchicago.com.