Page 1 of A Mind of Her Own
Alexandra Victoria Peterson Bouvier was born in Paris in 1900, the last year of the reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain.
Alexandra’s father was French, and her mother was American.
The legendary British monarch had always had particular significance to Alexandra’s American maternal grandparents, Paul and Miriam Peterson.
They were born twenty-nine and thirty-one years after the famous queen, and had shared a great admiration for her, for her strength, her values, and the role model she represented for young, independent women.
Queen Victoria was eighteen when she ascended the throne, and she ruled an empire for sixty-three years.
Both Miriam and Paul felt that she was a shining example of womanhood at its best.
She ruled wisely and well, had been a devoted wife, and had nine children, who eventually sat on nearly every throne in Europe.
She was both a modern woman and a traditionalist, and combined these traits effectively.
Widowed at forty-two, bereft over the early death of her beloved consort, Prince Albert, she ruled alone thereafter.
She was the longest reigning sovereign of her day.
Paul and Miriam Peterson named their only child Victoria after the British queen.
Victoria Peterson, Alexandra’s American mother, was born in Illinois in 1875, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and had been for nearly forty years.
Victoria Peterson’s dream for her daughter Alexandra was that she would be a strong, intelligent, independent woman one day, ready to take a stand for the causes she believed in, demonstrating her own ethics and the values she and her husband intended to instill in her.
Alexandra matured exactly as her parents hoped she would.
Victoria Peterson had been born and grew up in Beardstown, Illinois, a town of just over six thousand people, two-hundred and thirty-two miles southwest of Chicago.
Beardstown was an agricultural community, and Paul Peterson, her father, owned the local newspaper, The Beardstown Courier.
He had lived in Beardstown all his life, and ventured out into the world to attend Princeton University, which opened his eyes and broadened his view of the world.
He did a year of postgraduate studies at Oxford, took classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, returned to his hometown, and used the money his grandfather had left him to found the newspaper that became his passion.
No matter how remote Beardstown was, or how distant from Chicago, he wanted to bring its citizens a deeper, more complex view of the world, and keep them fully informed of what was happening around the globe.
The Beardstown Courier was his pride and joy.
It covered local, national, and international politics, world events, anything of major interest happening in Chicago, important agricultural news and innovative developments, and whatever widened the perspective of the locals, some of whom had never been as far as Chicago, and rarely left their farms.
Paul Peterson made it possible for them to be up-to-date on a variety of subjects, no matter how small and remote their town was.
He had a global mentality.
He had enjoyed his time at Oxford, and traveled around Europe when he was there.
He had studied hard and returned to Beardstown nearly fluent in French and German.
He had read their newspapers as well, and he had fallen in love with Italy.
He had brought his exposure to other cultures home with him, and infused his newspaper with interesting information from abroad.
He wrote a weekly editorial column on a variety of topics, and his newspaper flourished.
People were hungry for what he shared.
Within a year of his return to Beardstown, he had a thriving newspaper, and married Miriam, the girl he had fallen in love with at seventeen, when she was fifteen.
Her life experience was the exact opposite of Paul’s.
An only child of older parents, she had been sheltered and protected.
Her father owned the largest dairy in the state, and she was educated at home, had never left Illinois, and didn’t want to.
She didn’t even like Chicago.
She was daunted by all the places that Paul had discovered and hoped to share with her.
She preferred to listen to his stories about them, and read his editorials, rather than visit the places herself.
She was well read and well informed, but her life experience was as limited as his was broad.
He never succeeded in making a world traveler of her, but he loved and accepted her as she was.
Paul’s own family had a thirst for knowledge and education. His mother ran the local school. His father was an attorney, and both had shared their curiosity about foreign cultures with him. They focused all their attention and hopes on Paul, their only child.
Paul strongly believed that higher education was as important for women as it was for men.
He wanted his daughter Victoria to go to a good university.
Miriam didn’t like the idea of her leaving home, but Paul convinced her that Victoria deserved to go at least as far as Chicago, and Miriam reluctantly agreed, to please him.
Victoria attended the University of Chicago, and was in the first class of women to be accepted in 1892.
She was more like her father than her mother, and thrived on the experience of attending university in Chicago.
She loved science the way her father loved journalism, and seriously considered becoming a doctor.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to invest as many years in medical school as she would have had to, and she let her mother convince her to become a nurse instead.
She got her degree in 1896, and followed in her father’s footsteps, doing graduate work in Europe.
She attended Oxford, as her father had.
Women weren’t allowed to receive degrees or have full status as students at Oxford then, but they had been allowed to take classes there for the past twenty years.
Victoria thrived during the year she spent in England, and she followed it the next year by becoming one of the first women to attend the Sorbonne in 1897.
She spent the year studying there, and learning to speak fluent French.
Her parents loved reading her letters, and her reports of traveling in France with some other fellow female students.
Her eyes had been opened to greater academic and cultural thrills than Beardstown could offer her, and she begged them to let her stay in France for another year.
Her father was more than willing to allow it, but her mother balked.
She missed her only daughter and wanted her to come home.
She was afraid that she might meet someone and fall in love and never want to return to Beardstown.
Paul assured his wife that it wouldn’t happen, and that once she got the travel bug out of her system she would come home, as he had, and settle down.
But in Victoria’s case he was wrong, and Miriam’s fears proved accurate.
Six months into her second year in France, having taken a job at a hospital in Paris, to help defray the costs of her lengthy stay and not wanting to be a burden on her parents, Victoria met Tristan Bouvier, a young doctor who practiced at the same hospital where she was working as a nurse, the Pitié-Salpêtrière.
She was twenty-three years old and he was thirty.
Within months they were deeply in love, and she had even less desire to return to the States.
Victoria was happy in Paris, and loved living in Europe.
Tristan came from a solid intellectual, upper-middle-class academic family.
His grandfather had been a professor at the Sorbonne, and his father was a doctor too, and taught at the medical school.
Tristan had plans to open his own medical office and start a private practice in the next year or two, and they talked about having Victoria work with him as his nurse.
They had dreams and made plans, none of which included going back to Beardstown to work at the small rural hospital there.
Victoria had seen too much of the world by then, and her mother had been right.
It nearly broke Miriam’s heart when she and Paul read Victoria’s letter, saying that she wanted to stay in Paris, and that she and Tristan had just become engaged. It pained Paul to lose his daughter too, but a greater part of him was happy for her. She deserved more than their small agricultural community could offer her. And he couldn’t think of a better place for her to test her wings than Paris. He just hoped that the young French doctor was worthy of her.
Paul and Miriam gave her their blessing, without meeting Tristan, and Victoria married him at Christmas, with their coworkers from the hospital and Tristan’s parents and grandparents present, along with a few of their friends.
The Bouviers provided a lovely reception at their home afterward.
It wasn’t the traditional wedding she would have had at home in Illinois, but it suited them.
Victoria was sad that her parents didn’t come for the wedding.
But Miriam was in frail health—it was winter and she had a weak chest—and Paul didn’t want to leave her alone, and she said the trip was too much for her.
Victoria understood, and the Bouviers were lovely to her.
They had a daughter now.
The young couple went to Venice for their honeymoon, and then came back to work at the hospital.
It was 1898, and a year later their dream came true, and he opened his own medical practice in the 16th arrondissement, with money his father gave him to build his future.
As he was an only child, his parents doted on him.
It was a small office, but his practice grew with people in the neighborhood, and word of mouth.
Tristan and Victoria were busy tending to their patients, and he did daily rounds at the hospital, to see the patients he admitted with more serious illnesses.
Victoria ran his office impeccably.
She was organized, intelligent, and efficient, and Tristan’s patients loved her.
Her nursing skills were excellent, and she had a warm, compassionate nature.
She cared deeply about her patients.
Her parents kept promising to visit them, but Miriam developed a migraine every time Paul pressed her about it.
She had fragile health, and was afraid she would be seasick on the boat getting there, or fall ill in Europe, or even die of some foreign disease.
Paul was aching to visit Victoria and meet her husband and his family, but Miriam wasn’t up to it.
She cried for hours sometimes, afraid she would never see her daughter again.
Understanding what was happening, and knowing her mother well, Victoria promised to come home to visit them as soon as she could.
But there was never a good time to leave Tristan alone with his steadily growing medical practice.
And months after he opened his practice, Victoria got pregnant, and Tristan didn’t want her to make the trip to the States alone to see her parents.
She promised to come to see them after the baby was born.
Tristan would just have to find a relief nurse to take her place for the time it took.
Victoria knew her mother wouldn’t come to Europe and her father didn’t want to leave her, or his newspaper.
Paul was tempted to make the trip before the baby came, to see his daughter and meet his son-in-law.
But he worried about Miriam’s health, and about leaving the paper for a month to make the trip.
They had to be content with letters until the baby came and Victoria could come home to them.
Victoria was diligent about writing to her parents frequently, and her father sent her copies of his editorial columns, which she had always loved.
She missed their long conversations about foreign politics.
She always learned so much from him.
Victoria assisted Tristan, seeing patients until the last month of her pregnancy, and then they hired a relief nurse to work with him.
Victoria worked in the back office, handling the billing and bookkeeping for him until the last day.
She’d had an easy pregnancy, and they were excited about the baby.
His parents were ecstatic about their first grandchild.
Victoria went into labor a few days before her due date, and everything went smoothly.
She knew what to expect, and her arduous labor wasn’t a surprise.
The baby was delivered by a midwife with Tristan standing by.
He held Victoria while the baby was delivered.
The midwife let him cut the cord.
Tristan handed their eight-pound baby girl to Victoria with a tender look and kissed her. Victoria was exhausted but triumphant after a long labor, and looked into the baby’s eyes, wondering who she would be one day. Maybe she would be a doctor, like her father, as Victoria had wanted to be, before she became a nurse. A new era was dawning. Women were becoming educated, and wanted more in their lives than housework and children. Victoria’s generation hungered for the opportunities that their mothers never had.
There was so much Victoria wanted to show her daughter and teach her.
The old limitations were loosening their grip on women, and Tristan and Victoria wanted every possible advantage for their child.
They named the baby Alexandra Victoria, and a month later, Victoria was back at work in Tristan’s office.
She brought the baby to work so she could nurse her, and they kept the relief nurse to help in the office when Victoria was busy with the baby, or seeing patients with Tristan.
It seemed as though their number of patients had doubled.
Tristan’s patients liked him, and the energetic, youthful atmosphere that surrounded him and his wife.
Tristan stayed abreast of the latest treatments, and was innovative about new protocols and medications.
Many of their patients were young, but older patients liked him too.
He had a positive point of view about medicine and life.
As she had promised, Victoria took Alexandra home to visit her parents when the baby was six months old, and Tristan managed without her for a month.
They had hired the second nurse as part of their staff by then, and a bookkeeper to handle the billing, so Victoria could spend more time with their patients.
Paul and Miriam were thrilled to see their daughter and granddaughter when they arrived.
Victoria hadn’t been home in four years.
It seemed like an eternity.
She was a wife and mother now.
The crossing took a week, and Victoria spent two weeks with her parents.
Her mother held the baby, and Victoria spent time at the newspaper with her father.
It had grown impressively since Victoria left home.
His newspaper was read by everyone in the area, and even by some people in Chicago, who loved his editorial column, and the broad scope and perspective on the news that he offered as daily fare.
People who read The Beardstown Courier were well informed about world news, and the paper had won several awards for its presentation of international politics and events.
When they left to return home after a wonderful visit, Paul promised to visit them in France the following year, even if his wife didn’t come.
He and Victoria both knew that getting Miriam to Europe would be nearly impossible, with her health and her fears.
He kept his promise, and visited them in France when Alexandra was a year old.
She was a chubby toddler then, with a mass of blond curls and big blue eyes, and Tristan and his father-in-law hit it off immediately.
The trip brought back warm memories for Paul of his own time at the Sorbonne and the year he had spent in England before going home to marry Miriam and start his newspaper.
Being in Paris with his daughter and son-in-law made him feel young again.
They all had lunch together at Victoria and Tristan’s home every day, before the couple went back to work seeing patients, and Paul took long walks around Paris, and visited all his old haunts.
He even looked up two of the men he had gone to school with at the Sorbonne.
One was a banker, and the other was working at his family firm, which made exquisite furniture.
Paul bought a beautiful inlaid dressing table for Miriam and had it shipped home.
He enjoyed meeting Tristan’s parents and had lively conversations with them.
Tristan and Victoria were sorry to see Paul go when he left.
It had been a wonderful trip.
It had been complicated for him leaving the newspaper, but he had left it in competent hands.
There had been no problems while he was gone.
When they had urgent questions, they exchanged telegrams.
But when he got home, he found Miriam unwell.
She had been in bed, feeling weak and dizzy for most of the time he was gone.
She hadn’t told him in the letters she’d written to him while he was away.
The doctor said it was her heart.
She’d always had fragile health. Paul was worried about her, and wanted to take her to see a doctor in Chicago, but she felt too weak to make the trip. A week after he got home, Miriam had a massive heart attack and died. She was fifty-one years old and Paul was widowed at fifty-three. He had fallen in love with her at seventeen, and she was the only woman he had ever loved.
Victoria was devastated when she got the telegram from her father about her mother’s death, and there was no way she could get home for the funeral.
It broke her heart that her mother would never see her granddaughter grow up, and had only seen her once as an infant.
Victoria hadn’t seen her mother since her trip to Beardstown the year before.
Her mother’s health had deteriorated in that time.
But even then, it had struck Victoria how much older her mother seemed than her mother-in-law, who was ten years older than Miriam.
She was doubly glad she had gone home and seen her mother one last time, and she was sorry not to be able to be there to comfort her father when she died.
Paul sounded strong in his letters, but Victoria knew how deeply he had loved Miriam and understood the immensity of the loss for him.
She promised herself she would go home again in the coming months, but they were always busy.
Tristan’s medical practice continued to grow.
She and his other nurse were constantly running. Their housekeeper took care of Alexandra every day, while her parents were at work, and they put her in school at three. Victoria taught Alexandra to read at four, and her father came to visit them again that year. It was 1904. He had been busy at the paper, and so had Victoria, helping Tristan. Paul stayed for a month and loved every minute of it.
Victoria took Alexandra to Illinois for a visit again when she was six.
Tristan couldn’t get away.
She took Alex to some of the farms, so she could see the colts and calves and lambs, and the child loved visiting the newspaper with her grandfather.
Victoria was stunned by how big the paper had grown.
The number of employees had tripled.
Paul’s mane of hair and beard were snow-white by then.
He was fifty-eight years old, vital and energetic, as fascinated by the world as ever, and filled his life with his newspaper and missed his wife fiercely.
Time flew too quickly, and it was years between their visits, but they were both busy, she with Tristan’s practice, and he with the paper.
On the boat on the way back to France, Alexandra said she wanted to live in Illinois one day.
She loved the miles of green fields, the animals, and the farms.
“I could work for Grampa at the newspaper.
I want to be a writer when I grow up,”
she said with a determined look, and her mother smiled at her.
“And what will you write?”
Victoria asked her.
She and Tristan always encouraged her, although Victoria secretly hoped that Alexandra would be a doctor, like her father.
It was what Victoria would have done, if she could.
But she enjoyed her nursing too, and comforting people.
She was a nurturer by nature.
“I’ll write books,”
Alex said, smiling at her mother.
“Grown-up books, without pictures in them.” At six, she was bright and mature for her age, and her parents spoke to her like an adult.
“That sounds very interesting,”
Victoria said.
“And what will the books be about?”
“I don’t know yet,”
Alex said.
“Grampa says that I can do anything I want to, when I grow up, if I work hard at it.
I can be anything I want.”
“He used to say that to me too,”
Victoria said with a nostalgic look.
It was even more true now than it had been when she was a child.
More women were going to universities, even more so in the States than in France.
But it was happening everywhere.
Some women were embarking on careers that had only been open to men before.
Doors were slowly opening that had been closed to women.
And by the time Alex grew up, maybe her grandfather was right and Alex would be able to do anything she wanted, be a lawyer or a doctor, or work at a newspaper.
“Will you get married and have babies?” Victoria asked her, curious about what she’d respond.
The days on the boat gave them time for lengthy conversations they normally didn’t have in their busy lives in Paris when Victoria was working and Alex was in school.
“No, I don’t think so.
Or not till I’m very old.
There are other things I want to do first,”
Alex said primly.
“Papa and I work, and we have you,”
her mother reminded her.
“That’s true, you do,”
Alex said pensively.
“Do I have to have children?” she asked innocently.
“No, you don’t,”
Victoria said with a smile.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
And just like Grampa said, you can be anything you want.” She wanted to impress that on her early, to encourage her to follow her own path, as her own father had done with her.
“Maybe I’ll work in the circus, and dance on the horses, and write books.”
Victoria smiled at her answer.
Her father had taken Alex to the circus, and she had loved it.
Despite her dream of becoming a writer, Alex was still a child.
But they had encouraged all her dreams so far.
She had wanted to be a firefighter the year before.
Alex loved the trip back to France on the boat, as Victoria wondered wistfully when she would see her father again.
She hated leaving him, now that he was alone.
He was only fifty-eight years old, but he seemed older now that her mother was gone.
There was no one to take care of him, and he worked all the time.
His newspaper ran like clockwork as a result.
She’d noticed that whenever he wasn’t working, he seemed sad.
He still missed his wife acutely, five years after her death.
He had no interest in other women, only work.
Despite her intentions to see him more often, Victoria only saw her father twice in the next eight years.
He was busy and so were they.
She had gone to Illinois once and he had visited them in France when Alex turned ten, in 1910.
Victoria was planning a trip to Illinois with Alex four years later, when war was declared in Europe, in August 1914, and it was no longer safe to travel.
They canceled their trip.
Neither her father nor Tristan wanted them crossing the Atlantic once the war began.
France mobilized on August third and the plans for a trip to Illinois that month evaporated.
—
No one was surprised when Tristan volunteered to help organize and work a field hospital that was being set up to serve the front lines near the Marne in September, and Victoria enlisted to go with him.
They needed doctors and nurses desperately.
Alexandra was fourteen then, and Victoria and Tristan had to make hasty arrangements for her before they left.
Tristan’s medical office closed in August, weeks after France entered the war, and both nurses enlisted in the army medical corps.
Their patients were sad to see them go, and the Bouviers acted quickly.
The obvious place to leave Alex was with Tristan’s widowed mother, Marie-Thérèse Bouvier, whom Alex called Mamie-Thérèse.
Tristan’s father had died of cancer the year before, and his mother was happy to have Alex come and stay with her, for however long the war lasted and her parents were at the front.
Alex was worried about her parents, and her father assured her that the field hospitals would be set far enough back from the front lines to be safe.
They would be caring for the wounded men brought to them.
He and her mother wouldn’t be on the front lines of the battles themselves, which reassured her.
They said goodbye to Alex and Tristan’s mother in early September, and left Paris on a gloriously sunny, warm day.
Alex and her grandmother played cards after her parents left, to distract her, and they cooked dinner together that night.
Mamie-Thérèse was a great cook.
She was seventy-four years old, impeccably turned out, and looked younger than her age.
She was full of energy and loved having her granddaughter with her.
Alex was a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl by then.
She was passionate about writing and kept a journal.
She still said she wanted to be a writer, she loved writing short stories, but she had a multitude of other interests, which her parents had encouraged, such as music and art.
She knew a considerable amount about medicine from being around her parents, who talked about it all the time.
But she had no desire to be a doctor or a nurse, even though she did well at science in school.
She was a serious student and got good grades.
There was never any doubt that she would attend university one day.
The only question was where.
She thought she would enroll at the Sorbonne, but she was interested in England too, since her mother and grandfather had studied there.
And with an American mother, her options were broader.
And she spoke fluent English and French.
Her parents had opened every door to her they could, and encouraged her to think widely of her choices and not to limit herself.
She got along with her parents, and for now, she liked the idea of studying in Paris, close to home.
But she wasn’t entirely sure and was open to all the possibilities.
All she wanted was for her parents to come home safely from the war.
—
When Mamie-Thérèse and Alex were cooking dinner on the day Victoria and Tristan left, they were still on the road to where the field hospital was being set up, near the battle of the Marne in Saint-Gond.
Victoria hated the idea of leaving Alex, but it was exciting too being part of the war effort, serving their country, and helping the wounded.
Victoria could have stayed home in Paris with her mother-in-law and daughter, but she wanted to be with Tristan, and to make herself useful at the front.
She wanted to share his work with him, and to serve her adopted country with him.
It never even occurred to her to stay home.
She and Tristan talked on the way to their post, and she knew she would miss Alex, but they had important work to do, and they knew that her grandmother would take good care of her.
Alex was proud of what her parents were doing.
All of her friends’ mothers had stayed home to take care of their children, and Alex wished hers had too.
But Victoria had explained that she had a mission, and a skill that was needed, as a nurse.
Nothing could have stopped her from following Tristan to the front, despite the sacrifice it represented, and Alex was proud of her.
She thought her parents were heroes.
As soon as the Bouviers arrived at the hospital, they could see how desperately needed they were.
There were severely injured men on cots and litters everywhere in the tents of the makeshift hospital.
Many of the men were unrecognizably damaged, some were moaning, others were crying, still others unconscious after surgery or in extremis.
Two priests were wending their way between the beds, giving last rites.
Victoria and Tristan changed into their medical uniforms as soon as they arrived, and Victoria put on an apron and headed to the surgical ward where she was assigned.
There were rows of men waiting for amputation.
She didn’t see Tristan again until late that night.
When she returned to the nurses’ tent, she hadn’t eaten, her apron was covered with blood, and she was almost staggering with fatigue by the time she saw him, waiting for her outside.
He had had a long night too.
And before they headed to their respective quarters in the tents reserved for the medical staff, he kissed her.
By then, in Paris, Alex was sound asleep between the clean sheets in her grandmother’s second bedroom, and Marie-Thérèse was asleep in her own room.
In Saint-Gond, Victoria lay down on the cot assigned to her, too exhausted to take off her clothes or her blood-soaked apron.
She tried to force the horrors she had seen from her mind, and fell into a deep sleep immediately, with the smell of blood still in her nostrils.
She was a million miles from their comfortable life in Paris, and all she could think of now were the men she was there to help.
The war had only just begun and there was so much for them to do.
Victoria was certain that this was where she belonged, with her husband.
The men she nursed would become her children for a brief time, and others would have to care for Alex while she was away.
Victoria had more important things to do now.
The wounded men needed her full attention, and all her experience and skill.
There was no way she could stay home with one child now, safely in Paris.
Her adopted country needed her.
That was all Victoria needed to know.
The boys she had seen that night were her priority, and Tristan’s, and the field hospital was their entire world.
Victoria fell into a dreamless sleep, until a young nurse claimed the cot she was sleeping on, and Victoria stumbled to her feet to give it to her.
She went to wash her face and change her clothes, and go back to the main tent, where hundreds of wounded boys were waiting for her, the doctors, and the other nurses.
More ambulances were already arriving, with more damaged and dying men, as she ran to meet them with the others, to begin the day’s work.
It was going to be a long day for all of them, and more wounded would be arriving, in a relentless wave of mortally injured boys and men, many of whom would have died by that night.
It was the worst carnage Victoria had ever seen.
She cried more than once before the day was over, and she fell into Tristan’s arms with a sob when she saw him that night.
There were no words to describe what they had both seen.
The war was just beginning, and they could both guess there would be worse to come.
They were seeing what war could do to human flesh, and the young soldiers they were treating were barely older than their daughter.
They were observing firsthand what they all knew before, that war was senseless and cruel.
And thousands of mothers and fathers, sweethearts and siblings, if not millions, would be grieving their lost boys and men before it was over.