Madame Grandin loved strolling in the parks -- Lincoln Park and Washington Park were her two favorites. She found the view of Lake Michigan stunning and often watched the lakefront from her window. Much of her time was spent in the Loop, attending classes at the Art Institute, shopping in department stores, and buying sweets at Gunther’s Confectionery. She also enjoyed visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition, located in Jackson Park, where the Woman’s Building especially attracted her attention.

In Paris, she had worked as an elementary school teacher so she was delighted to have an opportunity to visit American schools and compare them to French schools. She was intrigued by coeducation as French schools were single sex. She was also very interested in the daily life and activities of American women. Although she found them neglectful of domestic chores, she greatly admired their freedom to circulate in the city. Relationships between husbands and wives, teachers and students, and parents and children were all fascinating to her, and more natural than those in France.

She and her husband took up residence in the Montparnasse neighborhood and she prepared for the publication of her book. An American painter Edgar Cameron, whom she had befriended in Chicago, offered to paint her portrait for the 1894 Paris Salon. The portrait was timed to coincide with the publication of her book and was called: “Portrait of the Author of Impressions d’une Parisienne à Chicago.” About one year after the publication of her book, she left her husband and Paris behind and began a new life in New York City.

In order to better get a sense of Madame Grandin’s perspective, I decided to investigate her life before and after her stay in Chicago. This decision led to a transatlantic scavenger hunt for clues that took me from Chicago to Paris and back to New York City. Since she had published her book under her married name, tracking her husband’s career as a successful Parisian sculptor was the most logical first step. During a visit with a sculpture specialist at the Musée D’Orsay, I learned that Léon Grandin had worked on the Columbian Fountain for the World’s Fair in Chicago. At the Montparnasse Cemetery, I found his gravestone but no mention of his wife. A trip to the Paris Archives was daunting as I wondered if I would discover any useful information. As Linda Colley points out in the introduction to her remarkable biography The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, A Woman in World History, “women seldom left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event.” Fortunately, Madame Grandin did indeed find herself in a sticky situation that merited a handwritten note on her birth certificate.

The scrawled handwriting on the birth certificate indicated that she had remarried in New York in December 1901. It quickly became clear that two parallel plots were at work in her story. While Madame Grandin was commenting on relationships between men and women in Chicago, her own marriage was apparently starting to unravel. Less than two years after her return from Chicago, she left both her husband and France behind. A ship manifest in the Ellis Island records revealed that she returned to New York in July of 1895 in the company of a young French man named Alexandre Ferrand and was expecting a child. Through New York census documents, I discovered that the family first lived in Manhattan and later moved to Staten Island. Upon discovering her last address, I was able to track down a copy of her death certificate and obituary. It turns out that I had been looking in a cemetery on the wrong continent, as she died and was buried on Staten Island in December 1905 at the age of forty one. At the time of her death, she was the president of the Staten Island branch of the Alliance Française and an active participant in the French-American community.

The maps, illustrations, and photos of Chicago give readers a sense of what life was like in the city at the time of her visit in 1892. Some of them feature well-known locations in Chicago such as the Auditorium building and Lincoln Park. Others depict buildings no longer standing including the Palmer residence on Lake Shore Drive, Gunther’s Confectionary, and the department store Siegel Cooper and Company.

As a young woman comparing French and American customs, Madame Grandin’s intercultural adventure brings out important differences between women’s lives in France and America. She perceived that American women enjoyed a greater sense of freedom and this seems to have motivated her to leave France and settle in the United States.

In chapter four, Madame Grandin describes her first reactions to Chicago and gives detailed descriptions regarding everyday life in a boarding house and in the city. She brings to life late nineteenth-century routines and takes the reader inside Chicago’s private and public spaces. Her sense of humor and her talent for quickly sketching the characters and scenes she encounters come across very well in this chapter.