“My luggage and my ladies were unloaded”

“Travelling by car, as a gentleman accompanied by three ladies, all through France without a driver, it is no small thing.” ¹ This is how the I-narrator of De vroolijke tocht (The Happy Trip, 1911) by the Flemish author Cyriel Buysse evaluates his trip to France. The travelogue is clearly autobiographical. Buysse had indeed toured France the year before, for three weeks, with one of the two cars he owned, a four-cylinder from the Belgian brand Minerva Motors. He was accompanied by three female passengers, which Buysse’s biographer identifies as “the Tromp-girls.” ² They were the three daughters of Nelly Tromp-Dyserinck, the widow he had married in 1896. Their names were Inez, Mary, and Thea, and they were 24, 20, and 19 years old respectively. According to Van Parys it was highly unlikely that Nelly took part in this road trip, because she insisted on comfort and suffered from poor health. Interestingly, the I-narrator never specifies his relationship with the women: The reader is left to wonder how a man could travel with three young women in those days without risking public outcry. The narrator never mentions their age, nor their names. He systematically calls them “my ladies” instead, occasionally “the ladies,” so they are usually represented as a collective, acting and reacting as if they are one. The limited number of times that they are not treated collectively, they are either anonymous or receive numbers: “[O]ne of my ladies,” “my second lady,” “my third lady,” “the second of our ladies.” ³ The second lady has a kind of epitheton ornans: She is the one “who tends to be distracted sometimes,” but that is the only characteristic the reader gets from any of the women. ⁴