Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Clémentine Delait – A bearded Frenchwoman in the Belle Époque who became a national celebrity for embracing her difference

In the sepia-toned haze of the Belle Époque — that luscious French daydream of absinthe and can-can girls, of powdered decadence and pre-war innocence — there was a woman with a beard. Not just stubble, not a theatrical disguise. A full, unabashed, groomed-to-perfection beard. And she didn’t hide it. She leaned in. Hard.

Her name was Clémentine Delait, and in the sleepy market town of Thaon-les-Vosges, nestled somewhere between Parisian romance and Vosgian mist, she ran a café with her husband and a gaze so direct it could cut silk. She served coffee, side-eyed gossip, and, depending on the day, a sharp rebuke or a hearty laugh — all with the nonchalance of someone who knew she was turning every unspoken rule on its powdered, perfumed head.

It started with a dare. Or maybe a law.

The official version is this: in the late 19th century, France passed a law prohibiting women from dressing in men’s clothing without special permission from the police. A curious decree, issued in 1800, still haunting hemlines a century later. But Clémentine — already known in town as a woman “with potential” for facial hair — spotted a loophole. Or maybe she just got bored.

She shaved regularly, like everyone expected. But the idea kept tugging at her — why play along? Why erase what the mirror insisted on showing her?

So, one day, she stopped shaving. Not to make a point. To make peace.

And what emerged wasn’t a freak, or a feminist protest, or a joke. It was Clémentine, sharper than ever, with a full beard that shimmered like a challenge in the morning light. She was 100% herself, and for Belle Époque France — obsessed with beauty ideals, gender roles, and facial symmetry — that was the true transgression.

She didn’t hide. She sold postcards.

Clémentine turned her café into a stage. She stood behind the bar like a lioness in a corset, pouring wine and pulling pints, a bearded lady in an apron, chatting up soldiers and schoolboys alike. Tourists came from across the region to see “La Femme à Barbe.” She posed for photographs. She signed autographs. She trademarked her own brand of spectacle.

Let that land: this was before Instagram, before viral fame, before the internet turned self-branding into survival. Clémentine was already there, in a corseted bodice, selling glossy images of herself with the same flair as Sarah Bernhardt on a playbill.

But here’s the twist — she wasn’t just tolerating the attention. She was orchestrating it.

Gender, she decided, was not an audition. It was performance art.

There’s a photo — one of many — of Clémentine dressed in a fitted men’s suit, a cigar pinched between her fingers like a dare, and that beard, of course, as defiant as velvet. She petitioned the police for permission to wear men’s clothing, got it, and strutted the boulevards of Paris with the casual panache of a woman who had nothing left to prove.

She attended carnivals. She judged beard competitions — not as a curiosity, but as a connoisseur. She stared down sneers and sneaky giggles. She walked the line between masculine and feminine like it was a catwalk, like it had always been hers.

Freak show? Maybe. But she was in the front row. Not the cage.

In a world that foamed at the mouth over “deviance” — with medical journals cataloguing every anomaly and cabarets turning queerness into novelty — Clémentine found a way to make her difference not only visible, but desirable. She didn’t whisper apologies. She projected pride. She reframed “otherness” as an aesthetic.

And it worked. For the better part of two decades, she was a household name in France, a walking contradiction who confounded beauty standards, toyed with gender norms, and somehow made it look easy.

Her fame burned brightest in the interwar years, when the world seemed fractured beyond repair and everyone was scrambling for certainty. Clémentine offered something else — a living reminder that categories were soft clay, not stone. That self-image could be sculpted with intention and cheek.

But the miracle wasn’t the beard. It was the joy.

Accounts from the time don’t describe Clémentine as grim or defensive. They describe her as funny. Warm. Radiant, even. She ran her café long after her husband died, bossing around waiters with the same irreverence she’d once used on gawking tourists. She was known to make jokes about her beard before others could, disarming mockery with timing sharper than any razor.

She adored animals, reportedly kept a pet chimpanzee for a while, and once posed with a lion — her wild beard still managing to steal the show. This wasn’t vanity. It was something else. Something like defiance wrapped in delight. The quiet thrill of being unapologetically visible.

And when she died in 1939, they buried her with full honors — and her beard intact.

The local paper ran an obituary not for a curiosity, but for a beloved eccentric. A national treasure. A woman who had lived entirely, vividly, weirdly on her own terms.

Clémentine Delait isn’t widely remembered today, except in corners of queer history and the odd French café still bearing her name. But she should be. Not because she broke the rules — but because she ignored the premise that they mattered more than self-respect.

She wasn’t trying to be a hero, a pioneer, a gender rebel, or a symbol. She was trying to be Clémentine. And by doing that, she became all the rest by accident.

Here’s the lesson, if we need one: authenticity isn’t an aesthetic. It’s a decision.

You can try to erase what makes you strange. Or you can grow it out, shape it, oil it, and wear it like a crown.

And if anyone asks, you look them square in the eye and say, as Clémentine once did —
“Why shouldn’t I? I like myself this way.”

That’s not just gender expression.
That’s glam rock before glam rock.
That’s self-love before hashtags.
That’s power in its raw, hairy form.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s freedom.