The gamine

By Matthew Sweet

SAINTLY JEAN SEBERG AS ST JOAN, 1957
They burnt Joan of Arc (1412-31) for heresy, but her style was also on the charge sheet: the male attire, the close-cut hair. The look still turned heads when Otto Preminger filmed Jean Seberg on her way to the pyre, a shorn, wide-eyed boy-woman. Seberg killed herself in 1979 – though her demons were the FBI, determined to punish political radicalism. Here she stands, the sweetest and brightest of Joans, a decade before anyone knew that J. Edgar Hoover was carrying a torch for her.

MILITANT A VIVANDIERE, 1850
1848: the Year of Revolution and the year of the gamin et gamine: impish Parisian street kids who became the footsoldiers of the June Days, gunning for liberty, like the child waving a pair of flintlocks in the painting by Delacroix. The coming of Napoleon III and the Second Empire should have sent them skittering home – but the figure survived, as the vivandière, the female cook who wore masculine uniform to boil coffee and mutton in the Crimea – and the “little gamin” whom Manet painted, wearing a crimson cap, gorging on cherries, and smiling as if the war had gone the other way.