Selika Lazevski exists in six black-and-white photographs and nowhere else. I first saw her when those six studio portraits appeared on Tumblr in 2012. They quickly spread around the Internet as readers asked, Who is she? But although I’ve searched for years, every pin I place to try to map the real woman snaps and slides out of place, multiplying new leads that take me nowhere. I wrote a blog post about her name, guessed the wrong photographer, and saw my error replicate around the Internet, too, even turning up in the publicity materials for a short film about Selika. This much I do know: she was a black amazone in Belle Epoque Paris, a city where black “Amazons” were shown in a human zoo; she was a celebrity who left no other trace than these six tokens of her celebrity; she was a horsewoman without a horse, a power hinted at but not granted.In 1891, Lazevski was the subject of a series of six portraits at the studio of Paul Nadar (son of Nadar) in Paris.

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Although Selika Laszevski had no real name, she did have a profession—though I can find no evidence in any newspaper, book, or archive that she ever enacted it. The first women to perform on horseback in the circus were trick riders and acrobats with tantalizingly short skirts, bare arms, and exposed pantaloons. In the 1830s, when the sidesaddle was reinvented, some women moved on to the haute école, the striking, disciplined “equestrian ballet” that had evolved from Xenophon’s On Horsemanship to the power play of early-modern court carousels and cavalry-school drills. These écuyères de haute école were among the first women to undertake this most masculine and prestigious of equestrian sports as professionals, and they did it à l’amazone (sidesaddle), en amazone (in a riding habit), and as amazones (the savage, romantic warriors of the Bronze Age transformed into brave but genteel sportswomen). To the dance steps of the passage and the skipping one-tempi canter, the horse and écuyère added perilous stunts: the horse walking on its hind legs as its mistress lay on his back, her hair mingling with his tail; the horse and amazone jumping high hurdles crammed onto a sloping eight-meter-square stage at the Folies Bergère; the horse skipping a rope turned by its rider; the horse throwing itself up and kicking out in the most demanding of the airs above ground, the goat-leap capriole, at the tap of its mistress’s whip and shift of her seat.

In sidesaddle, a woman is masculine and military above the waist—see Selika’s top hat and double-breasted bumfreezer jacket—and beneath the flowing skirts or apron of her habit she wears breeches and boots. (“Horsewomen’s boots” were also fashionable for men in Paris.) She grips the “leaping horn” or split pommel between her knees instead of straddling the horse as the real Amazons did on the Eurasian steppes. On the surface, she is poised like a swan on water, as if perched gingerly on a man’s lap, but below, she is all muscle. To replace her absent leg, she carries the whip or cane. A featherlight, most ladylike of dommes, she makes the horse obey and grunt as he skips and high steps in the pas espagnole.

The horsewoman and her mount circle the ring for the pleasure of men, who fill the boxes with their own top hats and double-breasted jackets. They are the sole recorders of notes for newspapers and novels (Goncourt, Daudet, Vallès), and they shoot and pose and purchase the cartes de visite and paint the masterpieces (Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Tissot). At the circus, the horsewoman is watched by the jockey club, the aristocratic equerries of the cavalry school at Saumur, the gentlemen amateurs like Laszewski. They assess the breeding of her horse and the precise configuration of its legs. They eye her whip and her spur; they praise her gentleness as she slips sugar lumps to her mount and pats his neck with a tiny gloved hand. They applaud her effortless ride, her gliding mastery. This male gaze was doubled: the gentlemen judged the piaffe and volte and weighed the horse flesh, and they measured the women’s flesh, too, for their busts, the span of their waists, the sadness or passion in their eyes, the queue of admirers bringing flowers and whips to the stage door. There were “two great seductions, woman and the horse,” according to the Baron d’Etreillis. And what, the journalist Hugues le Roux posed, of “the troubling beauty of a woman on a horse, this plastic coupling of two curvilinears that are the most perfect creation: the stallion, aggrandizing woman in all her majesty; woman on the creature she rides, posed audaciously like a wing”? Mademoiselle wielded the whip, but not the power.

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In the northern quarter of the Bois de Boulogne in February 1891, not far from the bridle paths where the fashionable women rode à l’amazone, an Englishman called John H. Hood positioned thirty-eight men and women from the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa in an animal enclosure in the zoological gardens. “Ethnographic exhibitions” were guaranteed money in the pot—crowds were always up a third, more francs clattering through the cash registers. Since one showman brought fourteen “Nubians” as foils to his wild animals in 1877, there had been Samis, Kalmuks, Araucanians, Somalis, Ashantis, and Senegalese. Their appearance was organized by the French government to pique the public’s interest in colonial expansion. The Society for Anthropology came to measure skulls and complain, in 1881, that they were not permitted to examine the genitals of the Tierra del Fuegians.

In January 1891, the Nouveau Cirque’s pantomime was La Cravache (“The Whip”), featuring Chocolat as a servant arrested by a policeman who thinks he is a Somali escaped from the zoological gardens. That year, the zoo offered punters the female Dahomey soldiers, or N’Nonmiton, whom they called Amazons. “These famous warrioresses, strange and legendary, who appear to us like a fantastical vision,” enthused the pamphlet that accompanied the show, “in I know not what troubling vapors of an African mirage, are here, under our eyes, with their picturesque uniforms, their deadly weapons, their dance and their war games, their savage and valiant demeanor.” T