Almost as fascinating as Dieulafoy’s unorthodox way of life was her marriage. The relationship she and Marcel formed was built on professional respect, partnership, equality, and affection in a time when these qualities were rare in a marriage. Dieulafoy reminds us that being an accomplished and daring woman in her time didn’t require a dismissal of the other half. A woman could be a daredevil and married. For unlike some of the other pioneers in this book, she found an outlet for her explorations, intellect, and professional pursuits as a highly regarded and beloved partner.3 Marcel publicly acknowledged her work and her partnership when most women and their contributions, scientific and otherwise, were greeted with silence or at best a slight mention. Even today’s feminist scholars acknowledge that the Dieulafoys had something special going on.
Jane Dieulafoy was a commendable archaeologist and a real first in the field. Her crews, all men, numbered in the hundreds, and she often oversaw them by herself. Beneath desert skies, inland and away from water, having suffered months of sterile digging—where each shovelful of dirt comes up empty, high hopes for a find decrease, and motivation weakens—Dieulafoy remained steadfastly devoted to her purpose. More than a treasure-hunter, she was very much the burgeoning scientist with a clear objective: the site of Susa. Monitoring the excavation trenches, devising field methods when there were few to none established, and meticulously mapping, labeling, and reconstructing what was discovered, Dieulafoy gave archaeology a good name. She gave “woman” a good name too, even if it was all dressed up in a man’s suit.
JANE DIEULAFOY WAS born Jane Henriette Magre in Toulouse on July 29, 1851. Her parents were well off, a family of bourgeoisie merchants that owned two countryside properties where Dieulafoy grew up as a “small, slender and blond” girl who “lacked neither grace nor charm.”4 Dieulafoy’s father died when she was very young, and she and her five siblings grew up under the care of their mother. Jane was bright and intelligent, a girl described as both mocking and affectionate. She was possessed of a quick wit and was already marching to a different beat from that of most little girls her age. Dieulafoy’s mother enrolled her daughter in a convent, the Couvent de l’Assomption d’Auteuil in Paris, at age eleven so that she would have an above-average education. There she was instructed by the sisters in Latin and Greek and lived a life of very strict routine and schedule: early mornings, prayers before breakfast, cleaning, studying, more prayers, bedtime. She didn’t rebel against this routine but, as she did for all of her life, accepted the very conventional conditions and even adhered to them with gusto and conviction. Yet she still managed to turn every assumption and rule on its head.
She stayed at the convent until she was nineteen years old and, a little surprisingly given her nonconformist stance on most matters later on, moved straight into marriage. Her charms, and a “face always crinkled in a smile,”5 caught hold of Marcel Dieulafoy’s heart. Marcel was a well-traveled young man, an engineer who specialized in railways, and he had a handsome face tanned by travels in Africa. Like Jane’s, his family also lived in Toulouse. Both families were well off, influential, and likely acquainted. From the cool confines of the convent, with its musty books and pursuits in spiritual atonement, Dieulafoy must have been gripped with excitement to meet a man who promised so much in the way of warmth and new direction. He was the open door to both opportunity and the Orient. She accepted his marriage proposal quickly, and thus began a life of partnership that would last forty-six years—until death did make them part.
Schooling complete, a comfortable marriage at just the right age, Dieulafoy moved through society smoothly and appropriately, with little upset. But with Marcel now by her side, the two jointly threw open the doors of life and considered a scene of vast possibility. Dieulafoy was powerfully committed to Marcel, not so much as a “wife” in the traditional Victorian sense of service and submission, but as a fiery life partner. As was Marcel to her. And they would make the very most of life.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when French forces began to buckle under the power of the Prussians and enemy ranks laid siege around the very walls of Paris, Marcel became furious. He requested active service (no draft or obligation to military service was in place) and was enlisted as a captain in command of troops based in the town lyrically named Nevers. When he went to war, Dieulafoy did too. A bride of barely twenty, she donned her first pair of gray trousers and a soldier’s overcoat, disguising herself as a boy—a clean-shaven sharpshooter, to be exact.
Women were only allowed to join the army as canteen workers. They dished food and filled water cups. Whether it was for love of Marcel or for an equally passionate drive to protect her motherland, Dieulafoy didn’t hesitate to choose the rifle over a soup ladle and become a warrior. She and Marcel endured a terrible winter together of marches, hunger, and exhaustion. Although cheered by their comrades’ acts of heroism, they were depleted, emotionally and physically, by the grisly horrors of war. Their bizarre honeymoon was spent on the violent frontlines. When it was over the Dieulafoys returned home, discouraged because their effort had not been victorious, but back in Toulouse they resumed a relatively normal life. Marcel went back to work, and Dieulafoy likely buttoned herself back into petticoats.
Domestic stability was nothing either craved, however. They were both intrigued by the exotic lands of the East; for Marcel they held special architectural interest. He believed that Western medieval architecture had its roots in the ornate styles found in the ancient mosques and buildings of the Orient, and his quest to prove this supposition began to define his chief interests. He wasn’t an archaeologist by training, but he was by nature. The Dieulafoys left France every year for trips to Egypt and Morocco, where they traced architectural influences and began to knit their passion for travel and historical research together. By 1880 they were preparing for their biggest adventure yet: Persia. This was where Dieulafoy said her husband would seek “the link which connects Oriental art with that of Gothic art,” the phenomenon that, “sprang so suddenly in the Middle Ages . . .”6
MEN’S CLOTHES WERE comfortable, pants were much better than skirts, and boots and overcoats were much more practical than dainty shoes and lacy gloves. After growing fond of men’s attire during the war, Dieulafoy probably didn’t even bother to pack a dress for Persia. An article from 1894 describes the Dieulafoys as a couple who “agree that a common dress enables man and wife to submit to the same conditions and share the same pursuits. One can go where the other goes in bad weather. Vicissitudes of travel and arbitrary social rules that make distinctions for petticoats are effaced. It permits an unbroken companionship. It makes possible one life where there are two lives.”7
United by love and two pairs of trousers, Jane and Marcel spent a full year planning for their excursion to Persia, a trip that would last nearly twenty-four months. They departed in 1881, and upon arrival in Persia they started to travel by horseback, carrying bags filled with photography equipment: cameras, glass plates, chemicals, and such. They also carried weapons. Two westerners— seemingly two men by anyone’s quick glance—without escort were very vulnerable to attack from unfriendly strangers.
ABOVE : Jane Dieulafoy, age thirty, dressed for travel and hard work in the field
The Dieulafoys traveled an extraordinary 3,700 miles in the saddle between 1881 and 1882.8As they moved across the landscape, they systematically documented and photographed old buildings along the way, creating a treasure trove of reference material for generations of future historians and archaeologists. Their “unbroken companionship” was put to a test that would sink many couples. There were days of pummeling rain, bad fevers all around, nights spent sleeping on rocky floors, stretched financial resources, and, for Jane Dieulafoy, a head full of lice and hair that she had to continually shave. Her blond locks gone, she looked just like a young man, “a rifle on her shoulder and a whip in her hand,” and one of her biographers explains that “she fooled everyone, from robbers on the highways to the shah himself, who did not want to believe her when