Mireille Havet (1898–1932)

Mireille Havet was born in Médan, France, into a penniless bourgeois family. Her father was a painter and she grew up in a rather bohemian environment, though her mother was a strict Catholic. When she was nine years old, her family moved to Paris. In 1913, the death of her father, probably by suicide after years of psychiatric treatment, left Mireille, her sister and her mother in deep financial distress. When she was not yet 15, she published her first poem in Apollinaire's review, Les Soirées de Paris. She followed with more poems published in Le Figaro and Mercure and began to make a name for herself. At 19, she published the novel La Maison dans l'œil du chat, with a preface by Colette, to great acclaim. In 1923, she published the novel Carnaval, which made her a key figure in literary Paris. In her personal life, she had a dark glamour and was openly lesbian. As early as 1917, before the boyish look came into fashion, she cut her hair very short. She was a friend of Colette and of Jean Cocteau, who gave her the role of Death in his 1926 play Orphée. In 1928, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and went to a sanatorium in Switzerland for treatment, where she died at age 33, leaving several manuscripts unfinished. Her diary, which she kept from 1913 to 1929, was discovered in 1995 and published in 2003. The city of Paris named a public square in her honor in 2009.