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For half a century, French literary critics debated fifty novels that appeared like clockwork — one per year from 1921 to 1970 — each published under a unique pseudonym, each in a wildly different genre. Gothic horror, pastoral romance, wartime thriller, children's fable, existentialist philosophy. No two books shared a style, a publisher, or even a handwriting sample. The literary world treated them as fifty separate curiosities.

Now, retired Lyon archivist Marguerite Colbert, 83, has spent the last twelve years proving they were all written by one woman: Élise Fontaine, a schoolteacher from Avignon who died in obscurity in 1974.

Colbert's detective work began when she noticed identical watermark patterns on manuscripts held across seventeen different French archives. Chemical analysis of the ink, conducted by the University of Lyon's conservation department, confirmed that at least thirty-one of the manuscripts were written with ink from the same batch — a custom mixture containing crushed walnut shell and lavender oil that Fontaine apparently made herself.

But the most compelling evidence came from Fontaine's own home. When the schoolteacher's modest apartment was finally cleared by distant relatives in 2023, workers discovered a false wall behind a bookshelf. Inside: a leather-bound ledger listing all fifty titles, their pseudonyms, their publishers, and — most remarkably — a one-sentence review Fontaine had written for each of her own books.

The self-critiques are devastatingly honest. Of her 1938 gothic novel "Les Ombres du Château" (published as Henri Morel), she wrote: "Competent but cowardly — I did not let the monster win." Of her 1955 romance "Jardin de Promesses" (published as Claudine Rivière): "My best lie."

Professor Alain Duchamp of the Sorbonne, who has verified Colbert's findings, calls the discovery "unprecedented in French literary history." He notes that Fontaine's deliberate genre-hopping was not mere experimentation but a philosophical project. "She believed a single voice could contain every kind of story," Duchamp explained at a press conference in Paris. "Each pseudonym was not a disguise — it was a liberation."

Several of Fontaine's novels were well-received in their time. Her 1947 war novel, published under the name Jacques Bernier, won the Prix Renaudot shortlist. Her 1962 children's book, credited to Madeleine Fleur, remained in print until 1989. Yet none of the fifty works were ever connected until Colbert's painstaking research.

Gallimard has announced plans to republish all fifty novels in a single collected edition, with Colbert writing the introduction. The first volume is expected in autumn 2026.

Fontaine's ledger ends with a final entry, dated January 3, 1971 — a year after her last novel. It reads simply: "Fifty voices. One throat. Enough."

She never wrote again.