Copy of Critical Introduction to the “Memoir”

By Nicole C. Livengood, March 2026

Authorship, Origins, and Authenticity of the “Memoir”

The “Memoir of Zulma Marache” appeared in the New York Herald on March 27, 1844. The Herald’s readers would have known that Zulma Marache was the young French woman who had, one week before, testified against three parties accused of procuring her February 14, 1843 abortion. Marache’s story was not unique. Throughout the early 1840s, the Herald routinely covered similar stories of seduction, forced abortion, and abandonment. What was unique, however, was the promise of hearing a victim’s story “in her own words…from her own manuscript” (“Sunday”).

The Herald’s editors, in short, were aware of the promise and power of the “I,” of first-person, eyewitness narratives. Take, for example, the title: the “Memoir of Zulma Marache.” It indicates for readers that they can expect certain generic conventions and that Marache told her story for her own purposes, pen lingering over the paper as she recounted her experiences. The term “memoir” implies a certain deliberateness and agency. Based on the title readers might believe that the “Memoir” was original and autonomous and accept the Herald’s claims. I was, initially one such reader. I eagerly clung to the “Memoir of Zulma Marache” as a first and only—the first and only direct account of a woman’s seduction and abortion among a number of similar stories that had been mediated and shaped by lawyers, journalists, and doctors to serve their own political and professional ends.1

Yet, the promise of the “I” was and remains perilous, as a long history of fictionalized or semi-true memoirs including John Cleland’s The Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1748) and James Frey’s controversial A Million Pieces (2003) illustrate. There’s little evidence regarding how readers in 1844 responded to the “Memoir,” but today’s twenty-first century readers might understandably greet the Herald’s claims regarding the “Memoir” with skepticism. They might note, as I eventually did, that the Herald’s announcement that the “Memoir” was “written by herself” conflicted with its occasional slips from the first-person “I” to a third-person “she.” They might observe, along with historian Brooke Lansing Mai, that it is unlikely that an impoverished immigrant woman would be “allowed to pen her own narrative while detained in the city prison” or question, as does historian Nicholas L. Syrett, Marache’s motives and truthfulness in writing and publishing the “Memoir” at all (Mai 315; Syrett, 90-91).

The Herald’s March 23, 1844 advertisement for the “Memoir.” Image from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

Such questions are understandable, and familiar to literary scholars who engage in the work of literary recovery. The term literary recovery means making more widely available texts that have been neglected, unknown, or understudied. Recovery work has been crucial for broadening understandings of American literature and history, and particularly for more accurately representing the lives and cultural contributions of marginalized and oppressed populations (Fielder 18). But such work is also fraught with questions, as scholars who have struggled to justify the investment in time and resources of unknown authors and texts can attest.

I am thinking, for instance, of first-person slave narratives and criminal confession narratives, both popular antebellum genres showcasing the stories of people who were usually disempowered, illiterate, and poor. They feature compelling, spectacular tales. Sometimes, such stories are eagerly accepted, but more often their authenticity and origins are greeted skeptically. Questions abound. Is an eyewitness account really the alleged author’s alone? Is it co-authored? Fabricated entirely? Can a purportedly first-person narrative’s origins be proved? Is a document claiming to be a memoir really a “memoir”?

I am thinking, in other words, of the “Memoir of Zulma Marache.” As I’ve developed this critical introduction to the “Memoir” I’ve chosen to follow thephilosophical lead of scholars who stress the dangers of assumptions and presumptions; who caution against overdetermining authorship and genre over what literary scholar Rafia Zafar refers to as the “author-ity” of a text (620); and who seek to untangle the core truths from the swirls of (re)mediation that threaten to erase and further devalue voices that scholarly paradigms and elite historical archives have muted or deemed unworthy.2 In sum, in what follows, I aim to demonstrate:

That “Memoir of Zulma Marache” recounts true and verifiable events.
That the “Memoir” represents a “moment of period or experience” and fits the definition of a memoir in terms of generic conventions (Smith and Watson 4).
That despite adhering to generic conventions, the “Memoir” does not align with Western literary assumptions regarding originality and intentionality. I believe evidence suggests it is a co-authored and hybrid text originating from multiple sources that have been shaped by many hands, including Marache’s own.
That it is imperative to consider the Herald’'s unusual investment in Zulma Marache’s story and its motivations in publishing the “Memoir.”

The “Memoir" as True and Verifiable

The “Memoir of Zulma Marache” appeared in the March 27, 1844 issue of the New York Herald, in French and in English translation. It followed the Herald’s coverage of an abortion trial in which Marache testified against her former fiancé, Napoleon Loreaux; neighbor Catharine Guetal; and abortionist Madame Costello, and provided a dramatic end point to its coverage of trial proceedings. The “Memoir” covers the 10 months between July 1842, when Loreaux began courting Marache, and May 1843, when Marache tells her mother about the abortion. Its depiction of intimate partner violence, nosy neighbors, suspicious mothers and—especially—specific details of Marache’s interactions with the “female physician” Madame Costello and the abortion procedure itself—make for engaging reading. But is it true?

District Attorney James R. Whiting claimed it was when he referred to the “truth of this history” in his closing arguments against Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello. In his summation of the case, he pointed to the prosecution’s powerful use of evidence to depict Marache as a victim and the defendants as her wrongdoers. A similar accumulation of evidence—including police watch records, District Attorney indictments, and accounts from several newspapers—makes it possible to verify and contextualize the broad outline of events recounted in the “Memoir.” The array of available sources paint a more expansive picture than the “Memoir,” offering context and revealing a story of Marache navigating domestic pressures and a complicated legal landscape. Marache’s testimony on the first day of the abortion trial reveals that after Loreaux refused to marry her—and even denied paternity of the child she claimed he forced her to abort—Marache sought justice through a civil suit for breach of contract of marriage in 1843 (“General,” March 21 ). Guetal, whom Marache evidently named in her civil suit, sued Marache for slander. Marache was unable to pay bail and landed in Eldridge Street Jail (“General,” March 21 ). From jail, Marache sent for a lawyer, and gave a statement of her case to Assistant District Attorney Jonas B. Phillips on September 12, 1843. She was released shortly thereafter. The New York City Police Office Watch Returns reveal that on December 1, 1843, Marache went to the police with her mother Constance to report her February 1843 abortion. Her complaint specifically identified Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello as the offenders (Complaint).

On December 1, 1843 Zulma Marache re-swore the statement that she’d given on September 12, 1843 (Complaint). On December 3, 1843, the Herald reported that all three parties had been arrested and freed on bail (“City”). The Franco-American newspaper, the Courrier des Ètats-Unis, reported a similar story two days later (“Chronique”). The Herald’s December 12, 1843 issue offers further documentation of the facts of the events. It printed Napoleon Loreaux’s affidavit protesting his innocence. It also printed a similar statement by Dr. John Abeille, who had been implicated in the case as having sold Loreaux medicines intended to induce miscarriage (“To the Public”). The District Attorney’s office filed charges against Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello on December 18, 1843 (People). In sum, there is plenty of evidence from numerous sources regarding the broad outlines of Zulma Marache’s story.

Abeille's and Loreaux's notices "To the Public."

The Herald printed Abeille’s and Loreaux’s statements of innocence on December 12, 1843. Image from Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

Authorship, Origins, and Authenticity of the “Memoir”

While the “truth” of the events Marache recounts in the “Memoir” can be verified, its authorship, origins, and authenticity are knottier threads to untangle. This is for two reasons. The first is that there are missing sources or knowledge gaps that I’ve been unable to fill. The second has to do with critical frameworks and assumptions that can bias or limit a person’s approach to the sources at hand.

The Herald’s promotion of the “Memoir” offers one example that illustrates both challenges. On March 23, 1844, the Herald promised a “singular and extraordinary memoir, written by [Zulma Marache] herself in French, which she gave to the District Attorney, as a statement of her case” (“Sunday”). It claimed, in other words, that the “Memoir” originated from a statement that Marache authored from prison. Its coverage of the People v. Catharine Costello, alias Maxwell et al., verifies that Marache did author such a statement. She testified on the first day of the trial that after being jailed at Eldridge Street she “wrote out a statement of the facts of this affair” (“General,” March 21). On the final day of the trial, Whiting reminded jurors that Marache had sent for a public officer before that officer sent for Whiting. According to Whiting, she then told him “the story of her wrongs, which she had written out” (“General,” March 24).

Each of above parties—Marache, Whiting, and the Herald as publisher of the “Memoir”—seems to imply a simple manuscript transmission: from Marache’s pen to the page, from the page to Whiting, and then, somehow, to the Herald as the “Memoir.” However, I have not been able to locate such a statement in either French or English. It is possible that it exists and has been lost to history, or that the scholarly serendipity that leads to archival discoveries simply has not occurred.

Another explanation for the missing manuscript has more to do with the questions scholars ask and their stance toward their subjects than the texts themselves. Perhaps I have not found—and never will find— a manuscript because it does not exist as I expect to find it. As Frances Smith Foster observes in an essay about African-American print culture, the “definitions and assumptions with which one begins have a significant influence upon the story one finds” (“Narrative” 735). Readers often approach authors and texts through a highly Westernized view that prioritizes written texts over oral texts and prizes individual authorship, intent, and originality as evidence of literary value.

A salient example of how questions and expectations inform an understanding of a text is the question of what Marache means when she claims that she had “written out” a “statement” from jail, and come from my own experience grappling with the origins of the “Memoir.” At first glance, her recollection positions her as a subject who performed the act of writing prior to meeting with Whiting. In that reading, the “had” is in the past tense, and such an understanding directs readers to look for a manuscript in her handwriting. Yet, her statement is ambiguous. It contains another possibility: that she relayed her statement to someone who, upon her request, wrote it for her. In this instance, the “had” is the past perfect tense, and it brings another person into the picture. This interpretation points to the existence of a mediated manuscript, one that recounts Marache’s story as told to someone else. If the latter, then the statement given on September 12 and re-sworn on December 1 is a contender for the manuscript the three parties reference.

Remaining open to the possibility that the statement is the text to which Marache, Whiting, and the Herald refer answers the question of the missing manuscript: it’s not missing! It also offers evidence of some (but only some) of the Herald’s claims regarding the origins of the “Memoir.” It is true that it is “in her own words” as a transcription of the oral statement she gave on September 12, 1843 (“General,” March 24). The statement is Marache’s story, but shaped according to questions Phillips would have asked and further guided by generic conventions that translated the “I” into a more objective third-person statement of events.

However, accepting the statement as the source to which the three parties refer does not address the alleged existence of the French manuscript that the Herald promoted and that it claimed as the origins of the “Memoir.” Nor does it account for the obvious differences between the statement, a manuscript and the multiple columns of newsprint that compose the “Memoir.” A 12-point Times New Roman double-spaced transcription of the statement’s 3 ½ handwritten pages (excluding signatures and witness information) comes in at just over 3 pages. By contrast, a 12-point Times New Roman double-spaced transcription of the “Memoir” as it appeared in the Herald comes in at eight pages. In other words, a brief comparison of the very materiality of these two texts show they cannot be the same.

The discrepancy between the statement and the “Memoir” point to more substantial differences in content and style. For example, the statement is direct but relatively barebones. It begins simply with the claim that Marache was “seduced on the sixth day of November 1842.” The “Memoir,” by contrast, begins with information about Marache and Napoleon Loreaux’s courtship, engagement, “connection,” and pregnancy, all of which occurred in the summer and fall of 1842.

The statement, further, is general regarding dates. The phrase “on or about” appears frequently. It also pays only general attention to individuals who were not directly involved in the case. By comparison, the “Memoir” names specific dates and times and a veritable cast of minor characters, including Napoleon Loreaux’s brother, Remy, and Marache’s neighbors Elizabeth Montelila and Henrietta Ponsot, both of whom testified in the People v. Costello.

Most of these differences are more of degree than in kind insofar as they tell the same general verifiable story. Nonetheless, the stylistic contrast raises the most questions regarding the authorship and origins of the “Memoir.” Unlike the statement’s dry and relatively simple narrative, the “Memoir” often reads like a gothic melodrama. At times, it is so self-referential and campy that it is hard to take it seriously. For example, in the “Memoir,” Marache describes her reluctance to take the abortion drugs Loreaux purchased. She reports on a confrontation that they had on December 3, 1842, saying that she said she was “no more disposed” to take them than she had been in a previous conversation. He replies, “Very well, I also will keep my word; I will poison you as sure as I am called Napoleon.” There is a similar moment later, in which dialogue builds narrative tension as Loreaux tries to make Marache drink the medicines. A neighbor emerges on the stairs above them and threatens them in an intimate and dangerous moment:

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Napoleon again offered me the glass, saying, “Make Haste and drink.” I said, “No, I will not drink it.” On seeing that I would not drink it, he put down the glass, seized me by the neck with one hand, and with the glass in the other said, “You must drink it!” I answered, “no, no; I will not drink it.” At that moment Madame Angela Montelila, who lives on the third floor, up stairs, went out of her room, and walked in the entrance, making noise sufficient to be heard from below. When Napoleon heard that noise, he pressed me the more to take it, saying,“Drink—drink—or we are lost!” I still refused; upon which he pressed me so forcibly, explaining, “Drink! Drink I tell, ye.”

Scenes like this make it hard to take the “Memoir” seriously as a “true story,” indeed.

The “Memoir" as Hybrid Text

What is one to do with a memoir with such a complicated and confusing genealogy? How does one account for the origins of the “Memoir”?

I argue, at this juncture, that the “Memoir” is a hybrid text, originating from multiple sources and shaped by several voices and hands. In other words, I believe that it is formed from at least two source texts, Marache’s statement and trial testimony that the Herald covered in late March 1844.

The statement and the trial testimony are quite different in terms of their audience, genre, and purpose and how each position Marache as the speaker/subject. The statement, as noted above, is a relatively dry account of the “facts,” translated from first-person to third-person in adherence to the conventions of legal texts. By contrast, Marache’s testimony is in first-person but is not a straightforward account of events. Rather, it was given in person, relayed in court in response to questions that Whiting and defense attorneys asked. It was a kind of performance for those in court, but few witnessed it directly. Most people encountered the testimony second-hand, through the Herald’s “General Sessions” trial columns and through other paper’s coverage of the trial. These columns did not directly transcribe the court’s proceedings but instead were selective. Its reporters and editors condensed and shaped information. They had to consider audience, column space, and taste when determining which details to include and which to omit. The disparity between the Herald’s treatment of the two sides’ closing arguments offers a striking example. The Herald dedicated over three of its six front page columns to Whiting’s closing arguments; by contrast, in its previous issue it covered the defense’s argument in one sentence: “James T. Brady summed up for the defense in a most able and masterly argument, and closed at about 10 o’clock at night” (“General,” March 23).

Despite the differences in rhetorical situation, the statement and trial testimony contain several similar phrases that appear in the “Memoir.” For instance, the statement records that when Marache told Loreaux she was pregnant, he said he would “repair his fault by marrying her” (People). The Herald’s “General Sessions” column reports that in court Marache said, “he was willing to repair it by marrying me” (March 21). The “Memoir” offers another variation: “He said ‘it was nothing, he would make reparation for his fault.’”

Another example that more fully illuminates the shaping hands of others appears in Marache’s explanation of why Loreaux wanted her to terminate her pregnancy and why he was reluctant to marry her before May 1843, the date they’d agreed on before she became pregnant. The statement’s use of third-person calls attention to the generic requirements of the legal document and the presence of a transcriber: Loreaux said “he was determined to kill both her and the child because his position would not permit him to marry” and “if she went her full time he would be obliged to marry before the time he had fixed” (emphasis mine). The Herald reports that after Marache described her opposition to taking medicine to terminate the pregnancy, she claimed “he [Loreaux] said if I would not he would make me or kill me and the child; he said what people would say if we should have a baby before we were married, as he could not marry until May; I said other folks had done so before…” (“General,” March 21, emphasis mine).

The “Memoir” records the same general information, but adds narrative interest by packaging it as a dialogue. For example, in the “Memoir,” Marache claims Loreaux said

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that if I preserved the child, he would be obliged to marry me before the time fixed, and also that he had reasons which forced him to do that, seeing that certain arrangements must be made with his brother, Remy Loreaux, who, if he knew that it was his intention to marry, would no more employ him in his store. And “besides this,” said Napoleon,” “what would the public say, if we had a child before being married.” He hoped I would consider all that, that he would once more warn me, and that I must take all he should give me to take; otherwise he would kill both myself and the child.

Reading the “Memoir” as a hybrid text—originating from multiple sources and shaped by several voices and hands—also accounts for a significant difference between its content and scope and that of the statement. Marache’s statement focuses only on the period between Marache’s alleged November 6, 1842 seduction and Loreaux’s claim to her that he had “disposed of” the fetus the day after Marache miscarried it. It does not mention Marache’s receipt of threatening letters beginning on February 11, 1843 and continuing to May 1843. Nor does it record her confrontations with Costello, Geutal, and Napoleon’s brother, Remy Loreaux, over those letters, or Loreaux’s breaking off the engagement.3

Yet, the prosecution and defense emphasized these elements during the trial, and they are important plotlines in the “Memoir.” There are, as well, details regarding the abortion procedure and Marache’s miscarriage that do not appear in the affidavit or in the Herald’s “General Sessions” column. It is possible that these details were shared during courtroom testimony and omitted. At several points the Herald asserted that it had condensed or edited information for reasons of delicacy.

If we accept that the “Memoir” is a hybrid text, with multiple points of origins and multiple authorial and editorial hands, then two more questions arise: what was Marache’s role in its authorship and publication? And is it really a memoir?

It is unlikely that we will ever be able to determine Marache’s role in writing or producing a memoir that so clearly is her story based on her words but whose own presence in its production is unclear. The historical record at this point is frustratingly hazy, seeming to elide her authorial position and intent entirely. In the essay in which I first presented my research into Zulma Marache and the “Memoir,” I posited that it was “unlikely that Marache considered herself the author of a ‘memoir,’ or even a writer” (Livengood, “‘Her Voice,’” 31). I explored several possible scenarios that envisioned her relationship to the text. Not yet having seen the statement or the legal and police records associated with the case, I accepted the Herald’s claim that the “Memoir” was a reproduction of the statement given from jail. Further, I suggested that it may have “appropriated her legal statement to republish as the ‘Memoir’” (“Her Voice,” 42). But I also suggested that—in the literary tradition of the 18th-century appeal memoir in which “fallen” women defended themselves and exposed their legal and economic disenfranchisement—Marache may have “sought or agreed to” the publication of the “Memoir” as a way of controlling how others viewed her and her story. Nicholas L. Syrett has also suggested (“‘Her Voice,’” 42; Syrett 91).

The inability to determine Marache’s role in writing or authorizing the “Memoir” leads to the question of definitions and whether the “Memoir” can be called a memoir at all. My view regarding whether this “counts” as a memoir has evolved over the years, as I’ve deepened my understanding of memoir and other forms autobiographical forms, as well as learned more about Marache and her life. For those who feel it is imperative to be able to position texts in clear generic categories, I am comfortable with the label of “memoir.” The “Memoir” focuses on true and verifiable events within a certain time frame, and the “I”—although likely interpolated—is not manufactured of out of thin air. Finally, the narrative, language, and the “I” are overall consistent across the three texts, offering a plumbline that runs through the September 12/December 1 1843 statement to the Herald’s trial reporting to the “Memoir” itself.

While I am comfortable classifying the “Memoir” as a memoir, I also agree with scholars Rafia Zafar and G. Thomas Couser who, from different disciplinary perspectives, caution that generic paradigms and categories can be as limiting as they are generative (Zafar 620; Couser 62-64). In other words, thinking too much about what the “Memoir” is, what it “counts” as, threatens to overlook the why and for whom the “Memoir” exists in the first place. The other question that needs to be asked, then, is not about genre or author, but about the source of its publication: the Herald itself.

The “Memoir” in the New York Herald

The Herald had a reputation for unflinching, pugnacious, and shocking reporting, and it was far less punctilious than rival papers when it came to decorum. Although all newspapers covered seduction and abortion cases in their police columns and court reporting, they often did so in vague terms and in just a few lines. The Herald, however, did not shrink from reporting salacious details, and often gave full columns to seduction and abortion cases.

The Herald’s attention to Zulma Marache stands out even when one acknowledges these differences in content and coverage. For example, between March 21 and March 24, 1844 the Herald’s rival, the New York Tribune, gave Marache and the People v. Costello roughly 30 lines. By contrast, the Herald gave more than 1,000 lines toward the trial. These lines do not include other articles in which it discussed the case and promoted its upcoming publication of the “Memoir.” Nor do they include the text of “Memoir,” which the Herald printed on March 27, 1844.

The discrepancy in tone and approach between the Herald’s coverage and that of the Courrier des Ètats-Unis, New York City’s French language paper, is even more striking.The Herald and the more established Courrier, founded by French immigrant Felix Lacoste, had little in common when it came to tone or editorial policies. The Courrier appealed to a diverse, broad French-speaking community, and attended to items of interest for New York’s Franco-Americans. Its coverage of Marache’s December 1, 1843 complaint to the police and the subsequent arrests of Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello exemplify its “moderate tone” and “middle-of-the road” perspective (Ernst 156). On December 5, it declined to share details of Marache’s statement because they were “too disgusting.” Further, it recognized the “horror” of her experience, but expressed some doubts regarding her statement, since she’d revealed her own “infamy.” The Courrier also adhered to the American ideal that one is innocent proven guilty. That the accused were French may have been a factor. In its discussion of the case, for instance, it expressed dismay that two Frenchman had been named in such a terrible case (“Chronique”). After the trial concluded, it resorted to the editorial “we” when it reminded readers that Dr. Abeille—whom Marache identified as having sold Loreaux abortion medicines and had been rumored to have been arrested—“had from the outset” proven his character in ways “we hastened to welcome” (“Scandaleux”).

The Courrier’s March 26, 1844 story about the abortion trial. Image from the Millstein Microfilm Reading Room, New York Public Library.

The differences between the two paper’s treatment of the case appears to have been one of rivalry and readership as much as politics and policies. The two papers sparred over their respective quality in the same period in which they initially reported on the case. On December 4, 1843, the day between the Herald’s initial report of the case and the Courrier’s subsequent story, the Herald shared that the Courrier would soon have another French-language paper with which to compete. It pronounced the Courrier as having a “slow, vulgar mode of management” and claimed that the “respectable French population want a new paper” (“Newspaper”). The Courrier poked back with supercilious subtlety, reporting with pleasure that an American paper had made a “cowardly” mistake when it initially named the wrong Loreaux as having been arrested in the case. It did not name the paper, but it had been the Herald that had misreported the case’s details (“Chronique”).

Gaining French readers certainly would have been a coup for the Herald, but that does not seem to be the only—or even best—explanation for its interest in Marache. That explanation rests in the powerful parallels between her true story and that of Parisian novelist Eugene Sue’s serial novel, The Mysteries of the Paris. Paris’s Journal de Debats published Mysteries in installments between June 1842 and October 1843, and it quickly galvanized the Western world. In broad terms, the novel revealed the dark, depraved underbelly of urban respectably, specifically focusing on socioeconomic and gender inequities and oppression. Mysteries’ central storyline focuses on Fleur-deMarie, a working-class, pure-hearted devout Catholic girl forced into prostitution and whose poverty—like Marache’s—lands her in debtor’s prison. Mysteries includes several other similar stories of working-class women whose gender and economic status makes them vulnerable to “rich, powerful, and respected [men]” (Sue 510) whose status and “veneer of respectability allow[s] men to pursue their own sexual and economic interests with impunity” (Livengood, “Serial,” 47).

The French version of the “Memoir” preceded the English in the Herald’s March 27, 1844 issue. Image from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

The Herald’s promotion of the upcoming appearance of the “Memoir” as “Fleur-de-Marie’s own story in her own words…from her own manuscript” offers the most powerful reason for the Herald’s interest in the “Memoir”: sales (“Sunday”). Papers had already evocatively connected Fleur-de-Marie and Mysteries to the story of Amelia Norman, whose trial for attempted murder concluded just a few weeks prior to the Herald’s coverage of Marache’s testimony in the People v. Costello.

As Julie Miller writes, the stories of Sue’s Fleur-de-Marie and Amelia Norman “cross-pollin[ated] in the press,” to the boon of savvy publishers and editors benefited from others’ tragedies (66). Norman had been a rural domestic servant who’d been seduced by a wealthy, powerful man who subsequently forced her to terminate pregnancies before discarding her and their child. When her attempt to sue him for seduction failed, she confronted him—and was jailed upon his word that she was a prostitute. From jail, she reported him for seduction, and that came to naught (Miller 47-55). After all, he was one of among what the Herald scornfully termed the “wealthy—the respectable—the pious—the eminently virtuous and straight-laced ‘upper classes’”; she was poor and female (“Morality”). When the law failed first to protect her and then to offer justice, she stabbed her seducer in broad daylight.

The Herald seized on a readership primed for the next installment, so to speak, and offered up Zulma Marache's story as “one of the most curious chapters in Mysteries of New York that was ever given.” In the Herald’s framing, Zulma Marache wasn’t Fleur-de-Marie’s doppelganger; she was Fleur-de-Marie in the flesh.

Yet, more than profits were at stake. Stories of financial precarity, seduction, forced abortion, abandonment, and imprisonment appeared in the Herald with alarming consistency. It repeatedly stressed the patterns of injustice and betrayal in headlines that began with the phrase “Another,” as if adding to a collection (Livengood, “Serial,” 52). These stories, in fact, became predictable; they also were easily forgotten, as the demands of newspaper publishing focused on brief reporting and just the “facts” rather than sustained attention to a person or problem. By contrast, I argue elsewhere, fiction like Mysteries of Paris lingered, allowing readers to invest fully in characters and to follow their stories through to the end. In linking Marache and Fleur-de-Marie, as well as a host of other characters whose fictional experiences uncannily mirrored and predicted Marache’s own, the Herald invited readers to care more deeply (Livengood, “Serial,” 59-60).

The Herald undoubtedly gained readers from its publication of the “Memoir,” and profited from its presentation of Marache as the real-life Fleur-de-Marie. And the same time, it also created a “more holistic, nuanced narrative” that emphasized the need for reform a “legal and cultural landscape that protected and equipped abuses of power” (Livengood, “Serial,” 49 and 47).

These assertions seem more certain than any claims that can currently be made regarding Zulma Marache’s intents or role in the “Memoir,” yet even they remain evidence-based speculation. In the end, then, and to return to my claims earlier, the Herald’s motivations in printing the “Memoir” do not matter, really, any more than the question of whether the “Memoir” is really a memoir. What matters is that its coverage—including the trial and the publication of “Memoir”—allows twenty-first century readers to better know a woman who, in the words of D.A. Whiting, “had the temerity” to seek justice for herself; the courage to document and tell her story; and to live a full life beyond the pages in which readers first encountered her in 1844 and in which I first encountered her over 175 years after her story appeared.

Click here to read about the editorial decisions that went into making Marache’s story accessible to twenty-first century readers, or skip ahead to the text of the “Memoir” to read Marache's story “in her own words...from her own manuscript” (“Sunday”).

Works Cited

“City Intelligence.” New York Herald, December 3, 1843. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
“Chronique Scandaleuse.” Courrier des Ètats-Unis, December 5, 1843. Microfilm. Millstein Microfilm Reading Room, New York Public Library, New York, NY.
Complaint of Zulma Marache, New York City Police Office Watch Returns Docket. Microfilm, Roll 28. New York City Municipal Archives, Department of Records and Information Services, New York, NY.
Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” The Work of Life Writing: Essays and Lectures. Taylor and Francis, 2021, pp. 62-76.
Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1836. Syracuse UP, 1994.
Fielder, Brigitte. “Recovery.” American Periodicals, vol. 30, no. 1, 18-21.
Foster, Frances Smith. “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Development of African-American Print Culture.” American Literary History, vol. 17, no. 4, 2005, pp. 714-740.
“General Sessions.” New York Herald, March 21, 1844. Library of Congress,Chronicling America.
“General Sessions.” New York Herald, March 22, 1844. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
“General Sessions.” New York Herald, March 23, 1844. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
“General Sessions.” New York Herald, March 24, 1844. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
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Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in Beyond Seduction and Abortion: the Life and "Memoir" of Zulma Marache, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.