Every year, at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, a very strange “Mad Women’s Ball” is held. For one evening, Parisians get into the swing of things to waltz and polka tunes with women dressed up as Columbinas, gypsies, zouaves and musketeers. This ball is in fact one of the last experiments of Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, a specialist in hysteria, who wanted to turn his patients into women like any others. In this terrible and powerful book, Victoria Mas chooses to follow the destiny of these women, victims of a male society that forbids them any deviance and imprisons them. Among them, Geneviève, devoted body and soul to the famous neurologist; Louise, abused by her uncle; Thérèse, a prostitute with a big heart who had the mistake of pushing her pimp into the Seine; Eugénie who, because she talks with the dead, is sent by her own father to rot within the walls of what must be called a prison. 

This first novel by Victoria Mas (born in 1987), published in 2019, was very well received by the public and critics when it was published. It has received several literary awards, including the Prix Renaudot des lycéens. Le Bal des folles is a strong book that reads like a celebration to freedom for all the women that the nineteenth century tried to force into silence.

We read this book in the fall of 2022.