Camille Marbo

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Camille Marbo was the pen name of Marguerite Appell Borel, a French writer born on 11 April 1883 and who died on 5 February 1969. She was the daughter of mathematician Paul Appell and married Émile Borel in 1901. In 1906 she and her husband started La Revue du mois, a journal about science and literature, where she reviewed plays, novels and other writings. She chose the name Camille Marbo from Marguerite and Borel. In 1913 she won the Prix Femina for her first novel La statue voilée. During World War I she helped with relief work, setting up the Comité de secours national with her father and running a temporary hospital in Paris, which earned her the Medal of French Gratitude. In 1916 she helped organize women for work in place of men, creating a recruitment center that employed more than 20,000 women. Her 1919 book Mobilization féminine en France described how women helped win the war, using clear facts and statistics. She wrote about forty other novels, plus monographs and memoirs. She was a friend of Marie Curie and gave Curie and her daughters shelter during the Langevin affair. In politics, she served as deputy mayor of Saint-Affrique from 1947 to 1954. She became president of Denier des veuves de la SGDL in 1928 and later led the Société des gens de lettres, first in 1937, then again after the war in 1947, and she served on the Prix Femina jury as well. She published her memoirs in 1967, À travers deux siècles, souvenirs et rencontres (1883-1967). She was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour.