Jacqueline Rivière

According to the newspaper's archives, Rivière was having problems with the first issue on 2 February 1905; the pending newspaper had one empty page that had to be completed before the premiere edition could be sent off for printing. However, the author of the piece that was scheduled to be placed there had fallen ill, and as editor-in-chief Rivière searched for something to fill the blank space. As David Hopkin says, it is believed that she quickly wrote the text for a new comic strip that would become exceedingly popular about a simple house maid named Bécassine who had come to Paris from the Brittany region of northwestern France and was helping with dinner preparations.[6]

“According to an oft repeated story, [the character’s] origin lay in an actual blunder made by the Breton maid of the magazine’s editor, Jacqueline Rivière. As depicted in that first 1905 issue, Bécassine is given orders to notify the marchioness [the lady of the house] when a lobster is delivered for the evening’s dinner party. But as Bécassine does not know what a lobster is, the marchioness tells her that it is red, that she is to check if it is fresh and to put it in the kitchen. Instead, Bécassine puts the dinner guests, four colonial officers in their red uniforms, in the kitchen, and informs the marchioness that there are three little lobsters and one large one (the colonel), but that the latter is not quite fresh!”[6]

Rivière asked a painter, Joseph Pinchon (1871-1953), to illustrate her first comic titled The Mistake of Bécassine and it was he who drew the young woman whose mouth, when she had one, was only a point.[7] Newspaper readers responded positively to the weekly adventures of the little Breton girl who journeyed to Paris to find work and became a comic book hero for doing so. The series, according to Yves Frémion, made Rivière "the first screenwriter of French comics."[7]

However, as mentioned by Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Bécassine was “quickly taken over by [the illustrator], Joseph Pinchon, joined by other male artists, who will long be the only ones credited for the creation and reproduction of the character.”[8]

In addition to the comic section, Rivière started a popular advice column that ran weekly in the same newspaper (La Semaine de Suzette); she signed it Tante Jacqueline (In English, Aunt Jacqueline). There, Rivière answered questions sent from readers and her advice often encouraged the female readers to be polite and obedient, which was standard advice given at the time to young ladies. The Tante Jacqueline column proved to be extremely popular and was continued by numerous editors for many decades after Rivière passed on authorship to others. (The newspaper La Semaine de Suzette was printed by the same publisher from 2 February 1905 until 6 June 1940 and again from 30 May 1946 to 25 August 1960.)[3][9]

The author wrote 15 novels under the pen names Bernard La Roche or Bernard de Laroche that were published from 1878 to 1900.[3] After she divorced her husband in 1899, she assumed the pseudonym Jacqueline Rivière for her later novels published from 1902 to 1920. It is said that the prolific writer worked until her sudden death.[3]

In the years since her passing, many publishers reprinting her early novels, have taken the opportunity to change the pseudonym used by the author on the original title page (Bernard La Roche, Mrs. Bernard de Laroche, Bernard de Laroche or Mrs. Alexandre Bernhardt) to Jacqueline Rivière.[4]