The Mad Women's Ball - Renaudot des Lycéens Prize 2019, Victoria Mas

Prix Renaudot des Lycéens 2019

Selected as one of Le Point magazine's 30 best books of 2019

Selected as one of Lire magazine's 100 books of 2019

Every year, at mid-Lent, a very strange "Ball of Madwomen" is held.

For one evening, high society revels in waltzes and polkas alongside women disguised as Columbines, gypsies, Zouaves, and other musketeers.

Divided into two rooms – on one side, the idiots and epileptics; on the other, the hysterics, madwomen, and maniacs – this ball is in fact one of Charcot's last experiments, eager to make the patients of La Salpêtrière women like any others. Among them are Eugénie, Louise, and Geneviève, whose troubled journeys Victoria Mas recounts in this debut novel that lays bare the female condition in the 19th century.