Amarante Durand

A French archeologist, suffragist, novelist. Literary experts assumed she was a candidate for the identity of V. M. Straka. She is perhaps the basis of Corbeau of Ship of Theseus.

She ran in the same circles as several of the most plausible Straka candidates. Some have suggested that she was too busy with her archaeological pursuits, activism and writing to have been V. M. Straka, though others have pointed out that this same standard is rarely applied to the male candidates.

Biography
The daughter of archeologist Valentin Durand, she was born in Tours in 1890 and her mother died during childbirth.

She spent her childhood at her father's excavation sites in the Dordogne region, and was educated in the field. She was a dedicated studen of her father's work. She was also a prodigious intellect and hardy spirit possessing astonishing maturity. At 16 she supervised work at Valentin's site near Saint-Cyprien while he was away in America. With a group of local amateur enthusiasts, they investigated the nearby Valojoulx area and discovered a prehistoric cave with elaborately painted walls. Many speculated that these caves were the setting of The Painted Cave.

Valentin learned about it in the newspaper and demanded that she wait until he returned and could oversee the exporation; she refused, making it clear that the discovery was hers as well as all future efforts. They never reconciled, until Valentin's death the next year.

According to Jean-Bernard Desjardins documents, the names "T. Stenfalk" and "A. Corbeau" appear registered in the Hotel Voliery, Prague, the day when Vaclav Straka committed suicide. It is possible that Durand (who would be 20) visited the hotel with Torsten Ekstrom.

She wrote her first suffragist novel novel, L'histoire Tragique de Marie Sergeant, when she was just 21.

Throughout the 20s she continued work in Dordogne, but also partook of the archaeological rush to Egypt, making notable discoveries in both places. She discovered a painting in a cave proving that since always humans gathered around fires telling stories. In October 1921 she was in Alexandria. Ekstrom visited her and had dinner with Guthrie MacInnes. There are alleged trysts with the much-older Torsten Ekstrom, who frequently visited her digs.

In 1924 a publisher revealed that Durand was the author of Chrysanthèmes d'Avignon. Durand was irritated by this breach of trust, but acknowledged the book as her own and did not shy away from discussing it.

Spain
Troubled by developments in Spain, she ceased her archaeological work and taken up residence there in late 1929. She threw herself in suffrage, labor rights, espionage and fighting in the Republican militia against the fascists, she helped to galvanize the Mujeres Libres movement, all these while managing digs in southern France, wrote articles, essays and books.

Notably, she expressed little regard for writers like Ernest Hemingway who purported to be helping the Republican cause, calling them "drunken dilettantes".

Ekstrom's death in '31 changed her a lot. In 1934, she published her magnum opus, the remarkable Je te donnerai toutes ces choses.

There is a picture of her with Gaudi at Parc Güell. She has a thin nose, jutting chin, black hair, asymmetrous eyes.

In October '37 she was in Hotel Florida with Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, her comrade Tiago García Ferrara and all were seen in a picture.

After Ferrara was threatened, he sold her out to the fascists, and she was killed in 1937 (31 Dec. 1937 or 1 Jan. 1938) by Franco's men near Madrid. Dos Passos hint that she was thrown from the roof and they shot her dead as she was still alive. Hemingway and Gellhorn talked only about the shooting.

Legacy
MacInnes wrote the 1940 bodice-ripper The Sands of Kom Ombo that features a narrator engaged in a torrid affair with a volatile female archaeologist. It is believed to be a proof of their affair. Much attention has been paid to her rumored romantic exploits.

Her death has been the subject of several books and documentary films, most notably the 1989 La Perfidia del Poeta by Beatriz Sicilia.

A lonely old woman kept a Durand museum in Perpignan.

Works
She wrote primarily archaeological papers and political essays but her fiction was also important. In several interviews at the time, she acknowledged owing a literary debt to Straka. Indeed they share a similar political radicalism as well as literary style (especially in dialogue and characterization). There are many common elements in Straka/Ekstrom works like images, phrases, even sentence structure.

L'histoire Tragique de Marie Sergeant (1911), published when she was just twenty-one, served as a call to action for suffragists worldwide. The Chrysanthèmes d'Avignon (1919) an experiment in literary impressionism, was published under the penname Estelle Plamondon. It received favorable reviews but sold only modestly until when her identity was revealed.

Je te donnerai toutes ces choses is a sweeping epic and a visionary indictment of the excesses of consumerism, the cruelties of capitalism and fascism, and the venality of politicians. Considered by many to be among the world’s finest novels of that decade.

It is suggested she also provided help for The Painted Cave.

In one of her books a woman warms a bottle for her baby and burns her fingertips.