The Horsewomen of the Belle Époque

In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. 

Blanche Allarty (source Rosine Lagier)

In Berlin, the old patches of wasteland left by the bombings of World War Two are vanishing, replaced by shiny glass and granite luxury apartments. But sometimes, the remaining squares of grass and cracked concrete will throw up white tents, brightly painted caravans, and swirls of colored light bulbs, moth-eaten camels grinding hay in their teeth—the unmistakable children’s-book shorthand for the circus. Scarlet and yellow posters sprout on neighborhood lamp posts offering matinee performances and promising that the animals are well kept (“Doesn’t your dog like driving in a car?” asked one poster I saw. “Our dogs are no different.”) At least once a Christmas season, a zebra escapes and gallops through a German town. Despite the animal-welfare restrictions and Netflix, the circus endures.

I wasn’t a child who liked clowns, and, barring a large and sticky red lollipop, I barely remember being taken to the Moscow State Circus when it visited my British hometown, but for the last nine years I’ve been scratching up the time and funds to immerse myself in another circus—that of nineteenth-century