Cimetière Saint-Vincent, Montmartre (continued): #2 Cécile Cassot

Cécile Cassot (1843-1913) was a novelist whose works include Un Amour de prêtre (1883), Honorée (1886), Le chant de l'alouette (1887, with a Foreword by Henri Fouquier), Trop aimée (1888), Pourquoi ne le dit-elle pas ? (1890), Le Secret d'Ursule (1890), La Vierge d'Irlande (1890), Autour d'un tableau (1891), La Fleur de résurrection (1894), Les Femmes de demain (1907), Les Éperviers de la Régence (1908), Outragée ! (1909), and Dompteuse (1912).

In Le Massacre des amazones : étude critiques sur deux cents bas-bleus (lit. 'The massacre of the Amazones: Studies of Two Hundred Blue Stockings') (1899), Han Ryner finds (among a number of other negatives) that Cassot has 'as much as any other political orator, the genius of imprecision'. He also sees her as 'the genius of pleonasm': 'The Cassot can hardly say 'That wasn't possible' without adding 'That couldn't be.' The language he uses to attack her is so fierce that I can't help but wonder if his brief analysis of Cassot's work tells us more about Cassot or Ryner himself.