Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism

1860, FEBRUARY 11: Women as Outsiders: In which Marguerite Eymery (Rachilde) is born, a werewolf appears, and traps are both set and sprung

1860, february 11 Women as Outsiders In which Marguerite Eymery (Rachilde) is born, a werewolf appears, and traps are both set and sprung Marguerite Eymery naquit le 11 février 1860 (1), à minuit, dans un milieu familial et un décor dessinés pour le roman. Gaubert, Rachilde An examination of the way in which Rachilde’s birth is presented in the three biographies already available illustrates something of the unacknowledged stakes and assumptions in biography.1 Analyzing the way others have framed a central event—Rachilde’s birth—shows that, in addition to addressing questions of truth and error, a broader issue is also at stake in the biographical endeavor: the problem of reading in general. A representative work of fiction by Rachilde (Minette) will illustrate the argument that focusing only on the image that Rachilde presented of herself—as exceptional—distracts from an important dimension of her story, namely, her self-conscious manipulation and exploitation of social codes. The quotation presented as the epigraph to this chapter is the description of Rachilde’s birth given by Ernest Gaubert on page 5 of his 1907 biography, the first book devoted to her, and the first of two biographies to be published during her lifetime (the other would be by André David in 1924). Gaubert relegates the fact that this date places Rachilde’s birth under the sign of Aquarius to a footnote (n. 1). David gives more importance to the zodiac in his account of Rachilde’s birth but otherwise repeats, in hiccupy syntax fragmented by commas, a similar story: “Sous le signe zodiacal du Verseau, qui représente, disent Virgile et Ovide, Ganymède que Jupiter fit enlever par un aigle pour lui servir le nectar, à la place d’Hébé, naquit, le 11 février 1860, dans le Périgord , au fond de la vallée très resserrée de Beauronne, Marguerite Eymery” (Rachilde 11). Where Gaubert makes “Marguerite Eymery” the first words of his birth announcement, David, while keeping her as the grammatical subject, shunts her appearance to the end of a series of presaging clauses. But differences of style and order aside, both versions offer the “received wisdom” about Rachilde’s birth. The elements are zodiacal sign, time of birth, place, and literary connections. Gaubert and David should be equally reliable sources. Both counted Rachilde among their personal friends and probably received this information directly from her. David, for example, makes it explicit in the course of his biography that the work is based on personal acquaintance , and, in the paragraph preceding the description of her birth, he records a moment in the present tense during which he is her guest at her country residence, les Bas-Vignons. She talks; he (passively) listens: “Aujourd’hui, je suis son hôte dans sa petite maison de campagne. . . . Elle parle; j’écoute ses souvenirs” (Rachilde 10). One detail stands out in both accounts: both Gaubert and David accurately give Rachilde’s date of birth as 1860. Rachilde liked to mislead people about this, claiming to be—or allowing people to believe that she was—born in 1862, a misconception so widespread that Le Monde gave 1862 as her date of birth in her obituary in 1953. To judge from this single point alone, it would seem that the biographies of Rachilde give us the facts we need to know, but that impression is misleading. On the “point de départ” of 1860 the biographers are agreed, but Le Cros today. Courtesy of the author. they also agree that Rachilde was born at the liminal time of midnight. Imagine the surprise, then, when, in the course of revising her 1985 biography of Rachilde, Claude Dauphiné actually checked the facts. Here is Dauphiné’s account; the italicized part appears in both versions of her Rachilde (1985 and 1991), the roman section only in the revised edition: C’est en 1860 que Marguerite Eymery voit le jour, en Périgord vert, dans la vieille demeure familiale du Cros, non loin de Châteaul ’Evêque et tout près de Périgueux. La petite fille, promise à une étonnante destinée littéraire sous le pseudonyme de Rachilde, arrive au monde un 11 février à minuit, dans cette province excentrée qui avait déjà donné au pays un Brantôme, et, plus récemment, un Eug ène Le Roy. Minuit . . . détail fourni par Ernest Gaubert qui...