ABSTRACT
Given all these fakes, it’s hard to fall back on anything solid and authentic in the nineteenth century—although one might reasonably have hoped for a bit of help from nature. After all, Auguste Comte’s teachings in positivism suggested that the secrets of the world were fundamentally knowable and that the march of science would, like a philosophical Torquemada, bring these truths to full expression. But what happens when nature speaks with two tongues, or when the body itself lies? “L’homme est double” [“Man is double”], Balzac had written in Louis Lambert, but even this double could be duplicitous, deceptive. And what happens when the double of a man is actually a woman? In the 1830s this question takes on a certain urgency, and several texts begin to trouble the boundary between masculine and feminine. 1
