by the grisly horrors of war. Their bizarre honeymoon was spent on the violent frontlines. When it was over the Dieulafoys returned home, discouraged because their effort had not been victorious, but back in Toulouse they resumed a relatively normal life. Marcel went back to work, and Dieulafoy likely buttoned herself back into petticoats.
Domestic stability was nothing either craved, however. They were both intrigued by the exotic lands of the East; for Marcel they held special architectural interest. He believed that Western medieval architecture had its roots in the ornate styles found in the ancient mosques and buildings of the Orient, and his quest to prove this supposition began to define his chief interests. He wasn’t an archaeologist by training, but he was by nature. The Dieulafoys left France every year for trips to Egypt and Morocco, where they traced architectural influences and began to knit their passion for travel and historical research together. By 1880 they were preparing for their biggest adventure yet: Persia. This was where Dieulafoy said her husband would seek “the link which connects Oriental art with that of Gothic art,” the phenomenon that, “sprang so suddenly in the Middle Ages . . .”6
MEN’S CLOTHES WERE comfortable, pants were much better than skirts, and boots and overcoats were much more practical than dainty shoes and lacy gloves. After growing fond of men’s attire during the war, Dieulafoy probably didn’t even bother to pack a dress for Persia. An article from 1894 describes the Dieulafoys as a couple who “agree that a common dress enables man and wife to submit to the same conditions and share the same pursuits. One can go where the other goes in bad weather. Vicissitudes of travel and arbitrary social rules that make distinctions for petticoats are effaced. It permits an unbroken companionship. It makes possible one life where there are two lives.”7
United by love and two pairs of trousers, Jane and Marcel spent a full year planning for their excursion to Persia, a trip that would last nearly twenty-four months. They departed in 1881, and upon arrival in Persia they started to travel by horseback, carrying bags filled with photography equipment: cameras, glass plates, chemicals, and such. They also carried weapons. Two westerners— seemingly two men by anyone’s quick glance—without escort were very vulnerable to attack from unfriendly strangers.
ABOVE : Jane Dieulafoy, age thirty, dressed for travel and hard work in the field
The Dieulafoys traveled an extraordinary 3,700 miles in the saddle between 1881 and 1882.8As they moved across the landscape, they systematically documented and photographed old buildings along the way, creating a treasure trove of reference material for generations of future historians and archaeologists. Their “unbroken companionship” was put to a test that would sink many couples. There were days of pummeling rain, bad fevers all around, nights spent sleeping on rocky floors, stretched financial resources, and, for Jane Dieulafoy, a head full of lice and hair that she had to continually shave. Her blond locks gone, she looked just like a young man, “a rifle on her shoulder and a whip in her hand,” and one of her biographers explains that “she fooled everyone, from robbers on the highways to the shah himself, who did not want to believe her when she revealed her actual gender.”9
LEFT: Ancient glassware recovered intact from an archaeological site
RIGHT:Ornately carved spoons and ceramic bowls
Throughout their travels the goal was always a remote and legendary place called Susa. Situated at a distance east of the Tigris River, the Susa region was home to an ancient city that had already undergone some cursory excavation years before. The Dieulafoys knew that its potential was great, and they wanted to have a hand in uncovering the ruins. All of that would come later though.
Their journey to Susa was strenuous, and both were sick and worn down by the time they arrived in a deluge of heavy rain. After nonstop travel, saddle burn, and months of camping, they must have craved a clean, comfortable bed. Perhaps even some croissants and a current copy of Le Tour du Monde. Having made the acquaintance of Susa, they left knowing that they would be back. Dieulafoy wrote in her notebook, “The souvenir of Susa haunted my husband in his sleep.”10
SUSA WAS AN ancient town surrounded by what was then a widespread emptiness: “. . . there is not a single habitation to enliven the landscape. Some nomad Persians and Arabs camp in this vast solitude, and live wild and savage on the milk of their herds, or on the fruits of plundering raids,”11 explained Jane through her nineteenth-century looking glass. As a royal city, Susa once exerted an influence greater than that of Babylon, and it was a town of “radiant focus” where artists from as far away as Greece would gather, flourish, create.
When the Dieulafoys returned to Susa in 1884—now on site to properly excavate and with all permissions secured as well as a formal team to begin work—they stood before an artificial mountain and a series of hills technically known as “tells.” It was a landmass created by thousands of years of earth and wind quietly cooperating to bury a city. Crumbling palace towers were peaks, and ancient roads had become low valleys where “wild cats and boars” roamed. Dieulafoy was bursting with happiness at their arrival: “The weather was rainy; our tents let in the moisture; provisions were short; our soup cooked in the open air, was better provided with rain water than with butter; nevertheless we were joyous—joyous because we had reached Susa, joyous because we had taken possession of the site which we had so long aspired to excavate.”12
The team unloaded their pickaxes, buckets, and tools and then, with enthusiasm still pouncing, faced three small dilemmas: the first, where to start? Choosing where the first trench should go was like opening the pages of a coverless book, hoping it was the one you wanted in a library’s line up of thousands. Would they plant their shovel right? Find something fast, or sift sand that contained nothing at all? Second, they had no workmen and they would need scores. And third, everything they excavated was under the watchful eye of locals who believed, perhaps rightfully so, that the artifacts belonged to them, not the Dieulafoys. The dunes were alive with these looters in search of golden relics, and come nightfall they would try to raid the site.
In deciding where to start, the team considered the work of excavations conducted thirty years earlier by two British men. Based on their preliminary findings, the Dieulafoys had a rough sense of where column bases and even a helpful inscription or two were located. The team decided to take their chances and excavate three tells all at once. These consisted of a throne room, the citadel, and a private residence called the “King of Kings.”13
With the massive digging task before them, they turned to the locals for help in recruiting a veritable army of workers. In her notes, Jane laughs at the process whereby “an old Arab, whose only nourishment consisted of the herbs which he browsed on the tumulus [an archaeological mound, or tell], a poor devil who had been robbed by the nomads, and the son of a widow who was dying of starvation in the Gabee, were at last enrolled at fancy prices . . . Marcel and myself took command of this glorious battalion.”14 It was a modest start, but the ranks of their field crew would eventually swell to more than three hundred men.
News of the excavations carried far and wide, and eventually their biggest headache was too much help. Crowds of men wanted to work the trenches. Every morning at the crack of dawn they would surge to the site, spades in hands, and if not put to use and given a day’s wage, they became surly and tried to “pillage the tents.” Once a desolate spot in the desert, the Dieulafoys had transformed Susa into a hub of swarming bodies—shoveling, sweating, and sorting.
As for the nightly danger of looters, that was solved simply: firearms. Armed watchmen were installed around the site and paid a fee more lucrative than theft. It was with all this in place
