Madame Rachilde: “Man” of Letters

MADAME RACHILDE "Man" of Letters Daniel Gerould 117 One of the most colorful and appealing figures in Parisian artistic and literary circles at the turn of the century-a period rich in flamboyant characters -was Marguerite Eymery, wife of Alfred Vallette (founder of the magazine Mercure de France) but known to her readers and fellow writers by her pen name Rachilde. Author of dozens of novels with provocative titles (The .Marquise de Sade, The Sexual Hour) that dealt with bizarre sexual fantasies , she was condemned by respectable bourgeois society as a monster and hounded by the police as a pornographer, but revered by the literary world for her generosity in recognizing and encouraging new talent. The guardian angel of Lugn6-Poe's Thbgtre de l'Oeuvre, Rachilde played a crucial role in advancing the cause of symbolist drama, herself contributing several of the earliest French plays in that new mode. As Alfred Jarry's closest friend and associate, she was instrumental in seeing that Lugn6-Poe staged Ubu Roi. At a time when there were almost no women writers of any note in France, Rachilde was accepted as an intellectual equal by her peers. Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Mallarm6, Huysmans, and Remy de Gourmont, among many others, praised her talent and commented on the originality of her work. Rachilde was also celebrated for her beauty, her enigmatic charm, her disconcerting wit. Sonnets were written about her greenish, cat-like eyes. Maurice Barr6s nicknamed her Mademoiselle Baudelaire. According to Jean Lorrain, she was "very pale ... rather thin, frail, with extremely small hands ... and eyes-such eyes! Wide, wide, made heavy by unbelievable lashes, and clear as water." Her pallor, grave expression, inner fire, and outrageous imagination made Rachilde a perfect fin-de-sidcle persona. Her career actually spanned almost an entire century. As an aspiring young teenage writer, she met Victor Hugo and received his blessing; when she died in 1953, Waiting for Godot was already playing at the Th6Atre de Babylone. Born in 1860 in P6rigord (truffle country in Southwestern France), daughter of an army officer and, on her mother's side, descended from a Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Rachilde grew up in an isolated, bleak environment, cultivating the life of the imagination and obsessed with uncanny things. "She had always been improper," Barres reports; "When she was still very young-erratic, generous, full of strange enthusiasms-she frightened her parents." She began writing stories at the age of twelve and was soon publishing them in local papers under various pseudonyms. By fifteen she had read the Marquis de Sade. Independent, emancipated, good at sports and handy with sword and pistol, Rachilde excelled in a world of men. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old author came to Paris and began working as a journalist, writing for L'Ecole des Femmes, the first French women's magazine , directed by one of her cousins, where her first novels were published. At this point, given her limited financial resources, Rachilde decided to dress as a man in order to save money on clothes and also to facilitate her getting around Paris more easily as a reporter. She cut her hair short and sold her long tresses to Prince Romuald G6droye, Grand Chamberlain of 118 the Emperor Alexander II of Russia. On her visiting card she called herself: homme de lettres (man of letters) and adopted the pseudonym Rachilde, supposedly the name of a medieval Swedish nobleman who spoke to her at a table-rapping seance. In 1884, at the age of twenty-four, Rachilde achieved her first great success when a Belgian publisher brought out her decadent erotic novel, Monsieur Venus, whose virile and sadistic heroine, Raoule de VWnerande, keeps a pretty but stupid young working-class man as her mistress and systematically humiliates and torments him by turning him into a useless love object. After his death, Raoule keeps a wax statue of her late lover, adorned with certain real parts-teeth, nails, and hair-taken from the corpse. With its shocking inversions of accepted sex roles and its advocacy of the androgynous ideal (long before it became fashionable in symbolist circles), Monsieur Venus caused an immense scandal, not the least of all because...