Reveling in her difference - Clémentine Delait, La Femme à Barbe

 

Clémentine Delait (5 March 1865, Chaumousey – 5 April 1939, Épinal), French café-owner and "bearded lady." Born Clémentine Clattaux, the daughter of farmers, she spent much of her childhood working in the fields. According to all accounts, she was noticeably hirsute from an early age, and shaved regularly. At the age of twenty she married Joseph Delait, a local baker, and the couple opened a bakery - later a café - in Thaon-les-Vosges (now incorporated into the commune of Capavenir-Vosges). In 1901, when she was thirty-six, she and her husband visited the fair in nearby Nancy. In her memoirs she recounted how she saw a bearded lady in the carnival and, unimpressed, on returning home she bet a customer that she could grow a better beard than what she'd seen. The wager immediately began attracting more customers to the café and the Delait's soon changed its name to Le Café de La Femme à Barbe (The café of the bearded woman). Along with the name change, she began selling souvenirs, picture postcards and signed photographs. 

She often posed with her pets. In this and the following two postcards, she has a parrot on her shoulder.

In her portraits she was posed in fashionable gowns, walking her dog or reading the newspaper. She also obtained permission to cross-dress - compulsory, at the time, for a woman dressing as a man - and she then posed in male attire, with a cigar and a glass of beer.

She was, perhaps unsurprisingly, very proud of her beard and very careful with it. Her barber visited three time a week to wash it with a special shampoo and claimed that, "she took care of that beard, she washed it, she clucked over, she brushed it every day", and when he trimmed it, she would watch him "like a hawk." 

Now something of a celebrity, she began touring, apparently attracting great crowds in Paris and London. During World War I, she worked as a volunteer nurse. Possibly because of the same medical condition or hormonal imbalance that resulted in her ability to grow a beard, she wasn’t able to conceive children of her own. So after thirty years of marriage, the couple adopted a five-year-old war orphan, Fernande. (Depending on the source, she may instead have lost her parents to the Spanish Influenza epidemic.) In the aftermath of the war, the couple opened a haberdashery in Plombières, Joseph now being too ill to run the café. 

Widowed in 1928, she reopened the café in Thaon-les-Vosges, she and her daughter even performing in cabaret shows there. And the establishment was still very popular, with customers visiting from all over France and Great Britain. She died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. In the 1970s a museum dedicated to her opened in Thaon-les-Vosges. 

As she had wished, her tombstone reads: 

Ici gît Clémentine Delait, la Femme à Barbe

(Here lies Clémentine Delait, the Bearded Woman)