Paris, Vernal/Philippe Lebaud, 234 pages.

For a long time, the term “adventuress” was reserved for what were known as demi-mondaines, i.e. those who, considering marriage to be a wholesale business, chose the retail trade to escape a destiny of submission and reproduction and conquer control of their own destiny.

This is not the type of adventuress we’re talking about here. Françoise gives us a dozen portraits of women who, fighting and battling both on land and at sea, forged a name for themselves and a political or military destiny. Others still, a spiritual destiny. Some of these women were the subject of separate books in Françoise’s oeuvre, such as Isabelle Eberhardt (La Couronne de sable) and Antoinette Lix (L’Amazone sombre).