arriage was no match for a good cigar that Rudyard Kipling had ever lit. “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke,” was the tobacco trope that defined him as a white male of Britain’s imperial age where woman, if included “was merely as an ornamental appendage and in an inferior role similar to that of the trusted native,”—as feminist author Julia Bush put it. Kipling, Britain’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, would have been as flummoxed as a Cuban in a ‘No Smoking’ lounge to learn that George Sand was no ornamental Belle Epoque maiden, but a celebrated French author
