It was unusual that the founder of the Girl Scouts found herself on the lifelong mailing list of a Lyonnaise tool and die maker. But such were the peculiar expressions of Mr. François-Michel Bélanger.

Bélanger was a young man in 1912 when he saw in The Times (London) a photograph of the luminous Agnes Baden-Powell. She became for him an idée fixe, the abstract object of his infatuation, his muse. He dedicated his life to winning her attention through a series of creative gestures that to him felt grand and romantic — freighted with an almost vulgar symbolism — but which were so vague and cryptic as to have escaped notice. The honeyed tones and hexagonal motif of these advertisements was an appeal to Baden-Powell’s interest in beekeeping, the occasional octagon his retreat when he feared that his overtures were becoming explicit. The ruler and pencil first make an appearance in the Bélanger catalog when he learns that Baden-Powell’s father had once held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford — never mind that her father died when she was an infant. Agnes herself died before Bélanger had a chance to meet her, which is certainly for the best, and not only because the fateful photograph that had so ensorcelled him had in fact depicted Olave Soames, the young bride of Agnes’s brother Robert, and a woman with whom Agnes shared a lifelong mutual enmity.

Published December 13, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.