The King's Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray

In The King's Midwife, scholar Nina Rattner Gelbart takes on a daunting task: the biography of a woman so fiercely private (or should that be public?) that she left no record at all of her personal life. "In her hundreds of letters there is never a single mention of her origins, parents, childhood, siblings, education, young adulthood, training, marriage if there was one, children if she had any, friends outside of her work," Gelbart writes, with more than a touch of frustration. What we do know about Madame du Coudray is this: in 1750, spooked by reports that the French population was in decline, King Louis XV appointed her to travel throughout the country, training young peasant women to assist at live births. For 30 years, du Coudray crisscrossed the provinces in pursuit of this goal, using a life-size obstetrical mannequin that she'd invented as a teaching aid. Gelbart relies on du Coudray's voluminous correspondence with regional authorities to construct her portrait of a driven, proud, politically savvy, and fiercely ambitious woman. To make her way as an 18th-century woman in the world of the male medical establishment--not to mention the royal court, and later, postrevolutionary France--du Coudray seems to have downplayed her interior life as much as possible. Yet Gelbart makes "a virtue of necessity" by using the very incompleteness of du Coudray's story to illuminate the larger issues at stake--the "history and mystery" encountered when writing any biography: "Historians always have to work with fragments and lacunae, with revelations and secrets. We may crave coherence and synthesis, but because much remains indecipherable we do not get it." Despite the ultimate "unknowability" of du Coudray and her motives, Gelbart does an admirable job in bringing her to life through her public works. The King's Midwife is a "scholarly" biography--a statement that might justifiably strike fear in the heart of the stoutest reader--but Gelbart keeps the academese to blessed minimum. For the most part, this is a lively and well-written account of an exceptional life.