Five from the Belle Époque (broadly)
A French president, a Jewish officer, a novelist, a Wisconsin firestorm, and a Caribbean volcano.
5 questions. Pick an answer to see the explanation. Share your result at the end.
What were the circumstances of French President Félix Faure's death in 1899?
Faure died on 16 February 1899 in the Salon Bleu of the Élysée Palace during a private afternoon with Marguerite Steinheil. The official cause was apoplexie foudroyante. The actual cause was a sudden cerebral hemorrhage during a sexual encounter. Clemenceau's epitaph: 'He wanted to be Caesar; he was only Pompey.'
How long did Alfred Dreyfus spend in solitary confinement on Devil's Island?
Dreyfus arrived at Île du Diable on 14 April 1895 and was returned to France on the cruiser Sfax on 9 June 1899 — 1,510 days, four years and seven months. He was the only prisoner on the island. For nearly two months of that time he was shackled to his bed at night by ankle irons (the *double boucle*).
What killed Émile Zola in his Paris bedroom on 29 September 1902?
Zola was found dead and his wife Alexandrine unconscious in their bedroom at 21 bis rue de Bruxelles. A coal fire had smoldered overnight in a poorly drawing chimney; carbon monoxide accumulated to lethal concentrations. Officially ruled accidental in 1902. A 1927 deathbed confession by the bricklayer Henri Buronfosse — surfaced in *Libération* in 1953 — claimed he had been paid by anti-Dreyfusards to block the chimney from the roof. The case has never been judicially reopened.
Why did the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 — the deadliest in American history — receive almost no national press coverage?
The Peshtigo firestorm of 8 October 1871 killed at least 1,200 people (estimates range up to 2,500) — roughly four times the death toll of the Great Chicago Fire that began the same night. Chicago was a major city; Peshtigo was a Wisconsin timber town. The national press covered Chicago and barely noticed Peshtigo. The pattern has held for 150 years.
True or false: A prisoner in a Saint-Pierre dungeon was one of only two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption.
True. Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a stevedore arrested for fighting two days earlier, survived in a windowless stone cell with one east-facing door — away from the volcano. He was severely burned through the cell's ventilation grate but lived. He was later signed by Barnum & Bailey Circus and toured as 'the man who lived through Doomsday.' The other survivor, Léon Compère-Léandre, was at the southern edge of the city in a thick-walled stone house.