Rachilde

Based on Wikipedia: Rachilde

The Woman Who Became a Man of Letters

In 1884, a novel appeared in Belgium so scandalous that its author was convicted of pornography and sentenced to two years in prison. The author never served the sentence—she simply stayed in France, where she couldn't be extradited—and continued writing books that would shock, seduce, and perplex readers for the next seven decades. Her name was Rachilde, though that wasn't the name her parents gave her. It was the name of a dead Swedish nobleman who had supposedly possessed her during a séance.

This was, of course, a convenient fiction. But convenient fictions were Rachilde's specialty.

A Childhood Designed to Create a Writer

Marguerite Eymery came into the world in February 1860, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, during the final decade of the Second French Empire. She arrived with one leg shorter than the other, a physical difference that would give her a distinctive limp for the rest of her ninety-three years. But that was hardly her most significant childhood wound.

Her parents didn't want her. They made this clear in ways both subtle and grotesque. The family had a pet monkey who received better treatment than the daughter—the animal was even granted a seat at the dinner table, a social privilege denied to the unwanted child.

Her father Joseph was a soldier, which meant long absences punctuated by dramatic returns. In 1867, when Marguerite was seven, he was imprisoned for four months after fighting a duel. Three years later, during the Franco-Prussian War, he surrendered his unit to the enemy and spent a year as a prisoner of war. During these separations, whatever fragile bonds existed between her parents deteriorated beyond repair.

Both parents were abusive. But Marguerite came to see her father's abuse differently—as carrying, perversely, some kind of hope at the end of it. Her mother's she found merely crushing.

The one source of warmth came from her maternal grandparents, who encouraged her imagination through play and reading, offering her what she would later describe as glimpses of fantastical escape. Her mother actively undermined even this relationship, teaching the girl to dismiss her grandmother as frivolous and simple. Gabrielle Eymery seemed determined to leave her daughter with nothing at all.

Anonymous at Twelve, Infamous by Twenty-Four

At twelve years old, Marguerite began writing anonymous pieces for the local newspaper. Then she did something psychologically revealing: she asked her father to read her own anonymous work aloud to her. This strange split—being both author and audience, both hidden and exposed—would define her entire life.

Some of what she wrote at that young age was already, in her own words, "inappropriately decadent." By fifteen, she was writing on commission, and she adopted the name Rachilde for the first time. The new name came with a new persona, a shell to protect her while she said dangerous things.

Emboldened by her early success, she wrote to Victor Hugo, the most famous living French author, and received encouraging words in reply. This ignited an ambition that would not be denied: she had to go to Paris. She had to join the literary world at its center.

Her father couldn't understand this desire. In the mid-1870s, he attempted to arrange an engagement for her—the traditional alternative to ambition for young women. She refused. Around this time, she later claimed, she attempted suicide. Whether this was true or another of her convenient fictions, it speaks to the desperation she felt at the prospect of a conventional life.

Paris and the Birth of a Scandal

Between 1878 and 1881, Marguerite escaped to Paris. Her father funded the move by selling his prized hunting hounds—a sacrifice that suggests he may have understood his daughter better than she gave him credit for, or perhaps simply wanted to be rid of her.

In Paris, she shed "Marguerite" completely and became Rachilde in every possible way. She cut her hair short. She went out publicly in men's clothing, which was actually illegal in France at the time—women needed a special permit to wear trousers. She deliberately shocked Parisian society with suggestions of gender ambiguity, playing with identity the way a card sharp plays with a deck.

Her cousin Marie de Saverny introduced her to Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress of the age. Bernhardt was herself a woman who had built her own identity from scratch, known for her libertine interests and her refusal to be defined by anyone else's expectations. She recognized something kindred in Rachilde and used her considerable influence to help launch the young writer's career.

Rachilde began hosting a weekly salon in her apartment every Tuesday. It quickly became the gathering place for young nonconformist writers—Symbolists and Decadents, movements that were defining the end-of-century literary mood. She wasn't just participating in these movements; she was at their center, the spider at the heart of an increasingly influential web.

Then, in 1884, came Monsieur Vénus.

The Novel That Made Her Name

Monsieur Vénus was a darkly erotic novel that inverted the traditional gender roles of romance. Its scandal was not in explicit descriptions—it was actually quite restrained by modern standards—but in the depravity of its suggestions. The book played with cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, and sexual obsession in ways that respectable society found intolerable.

Published initially in Belgium, the novel prompted authorities there to charge Rachilde with pornography. She was convicted in absentia and sentenced to two years in prison. Since Belgium couldn't extradite her from France, the sentence had the practical effect of ensuring she stayed in Paris—which was, of course, exactly where she wanted to be.

The trial made her famous. Scandal, she discovered, was excellent marketing.

Marriage and the Mercure de France

In 1885, Rachilde met Alfred Vallette, a writer and editor. They married in 1889, despite his disapproval of her writing and her sometimes shocking public behavior. The marriage marked a turning point: she regrew her hair, adopted a more subdued public presentation, and a few months after their civil ceremony, gave birth to their only child.

She named the daughter Gabrielle, after her own estranged mother. Whether this was an attempt at reconciliation or a subtle act of revenge—saddling a child with the name of a woman she despised—is impossible to know. What is clear is that Rachilde disliked motherhood and prioritized her writing and her support of other writers over her daughter.

The following year, 1890, Vallette launched Mercure de France, which would become the most influential avant-garde journal of arts and literature of its era. Rachilde served as the journal's literary critic and creative advisor to her husband. She didn't just write her own material—she helped select and shape the work of others, wielding enormous influence over what constituted literary value in fin de siècle France.

Her Tuesday salons moved to the Mercure offices and grew in prestige. The guest list reads like a roll call of everyone who mattered in late nineteenth-century culture: the inner circle of Symbolist writers, certainly, but also Oscar Wilde, the painters Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, composer Maurice Ravel, and the playwright Alfred Jarry, whose absurdist masterpiece Ubu Roi would scandalize Paris in 1896.

Symbolism and the Decadent Movement

To understand Rachilde's significance, you need to understand the literary movements she was part of—and the subtle distinctions between them.

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged in France in the late nineteenth century as a reaction against Realism and Naturalism. Where Realists tried to depict the world as it objectively was, Symbolists believed that the deeper truths of human experience could only be approached through suggestion, metaphor, and the evocation of emotional states. They were interested in dreams, in moods, in the ineffable.

The Decadent movement overlapped significantly with Symbolism but had a different emphasis. Where Symbolists sought transcendence through beauty, Decadents explored decay, perversion, and the exhaustion of civilization. They were fascinated by what one critic called "la maladie du siècle"—the sickness of the century—the profound ennui and disillusion that seemed to hang over the end of the 1800s. Their work often featured protagonists who were world-weary, sensation-seeking, morally ambiguous, and psychologically complex.

Rachilde fit both categories, though she resisted easy classification. When the Symbolists tried to take over Le Décadent, a journal associated with the more explicit Decadent movement, she actively opposed them. She published in both Symbolist and Decadent journals, maintaining friendships and alliances across the factional lines that divided the avant-garde.

Her friend Maurice Barrès—a complicated figure who admired, lusted after, and pitied her in roughly equal measure—described her writing as a dreamlike extension of life. She wrote, he said, primarily to titillate but also to explore the sickness of the age. In women, this malaise was understood at the time as hysteria—a diagnosis that said more about the limitations of nineteenth-century psychology than about the women it was applied to.

What She Wrote About

Rachilde's work embraced or at least explored virtually every form of sexuality that respectable society considered deviant: prostitution, cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, homosexuality, sadism, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, and more. Her novels were shocking not because of explicit descriptions—she was actually relatively restrained in her depictions—but because of what she suggested, what she implied, what she forced readers to imagine.

But according to Rachilde herself, the real vice she exposed in her work was none of these things. The real vice was Love.

Obsession runs through her entire body of work—characters consumed by desires they cannot control, destroyed by passions they cannot escape. She portrayed sexual desire as something powerful, beyond rational governance, and perhaps fundamentally frightening. Her characters' entire lives are formed or constrained by overpowering psychological conditions: delirium, terror, compulsions that drive them toward their own destruction.

After Monsieur Vénus came La Marquise de Sade in 1887, another exploration of transgressive sexuality, and La Jongleuse in 1900. She wrote plays as well as novels, working particularly with Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art and later the Théâtre de l'Œuvre to develop Symbolist theater. Her drama The Crystal Spider, produced in 1894, established a refined model for what Symbolist theater could be.

The Question of Gender

Rachilde's relationship with gender remains genuinely difficult to categorize, even by contemporary standards. She dressed in men's clothing despite French law prohibiting this without a special permit. Her application for such a permit survives, and it's a fascinating document—simultaneously bold and politely deferential:

Dear Sir, please authorize me to wear men's clothing. Please read the following attestation, I beg you and do not confuse my inquiry with other classless women who seek scandal under the above costume.

She referred to herself as androgynous, but her definition was functional and pragmatic rather than metaphysical. There was such a thing as a man of letters, she observed, but not a woman of letters. Since she was a writer, she was both a woman and a man. Her calling cards identified her as "Rachilde, homme de lettres"—Rachilde, man of letters.

Her views on gender were deeply shaped by her childhood. She distrusted women because her mother had deceived and abused her. She envied men because her father, for all his faults, had freedom and privilege that women were denied. She once wrote:

I never trusted women since I was first deceived by the eternal feminine under the maternal mask and I don't trust myself anymore. I always regretted not being a man, not so much because I value the other half of mankind but because, since I was forced by duty or by taste to live like a man, to carry alone the heavy burden of life during my childhood, it would have been preferable to have had at least the privileges if not the appearances.

She referred to women as "the inferior brothers of men"—a phrase that reveals how thoroughly she had internalized the misogyny of her era, even as she transgressed its boundaries.

Love, Desire, and Complicated Friendships

Rachilde's romantic and sexual life was as complex as her gender presentation. She had an early affair with a man named Léo d'Orfer, to whom she dedicated Monsieur Vénus. Just before writing that novel, she experienced what she described as a fruitless passion for the poet Catulle Mendès.

Though she would later deny any attraction to women, she also had a relationship with Gisèle d'Estoc, a bisexual woman of some notoriety. The affair unfolded in playful secrecy and ended with tremendous drama in 1887—the same year La Marquise de Sade was published.

Her views on sexuality were conflicted and perhaps deliberately obscured. Her friend Maurice Barrès quoted her as suggesting that God had made a mistake in combining love and sensuality:

God should have created love on one side and the senses on the other. True love should consist only of warm friendship. Let us sacrifice the senses, the beast.

Whether this represented her genuine belief or a performance for a male friend who wanted to hear such things is impossible to determine. Rachilde was always performing, always creating personas, always saying what would get the most interesting reaction.

Her friendships were often tortured by the inability of her male friends to decide whether they admired her, lusted for her, or pitied her. Jean Lorrain, a close friend, referred to her and his other female friends as "high-strung, sex-addicted perverts." Her response was characteristically sharp: he and her other male friends were also neurotic, she said, just in a more balanced way.

Despite these complicated dynamics, she went out of her way for her friends. When the poet Paul Verlaine was dying, she used her connections to arrange hospital care for him. She was an early supporter of the writer Colette and befriended the American expatriate Natalie Clifford Barney, who was openly lesbian. She publicly defended homosexual love in her articles, though sometimes with mixed results. She counted among her close friends some of the most prominent gay men of the era, including Oscar Wilde, who brought his lover Lord Alfred Douglas to her salons.

She may not have been settled with herself, as one observer noted, but she did not let it make her unsettled with those she cared about.

The Many Names of Rachilde

The pseudonym Rachilde initially gave young Marguerite some anonymity and gender ambiguity, but it became much more than a pen name. When her identity was discovered, she explained that Rachilde was the name of a long-dead Swedish lord who had come to her in a séance and possessed her. This allowed her to shift blame for her perverse writings to spiritual possession while also providing an internal explanation for why she felt so different from everyone around her.

She experimented briefly with other identities. In 1885, she published a serial novel under the name Jean Yvan—a male name that gave her complete gender camouflage. The experiment was unsuccessful, and she returned to Rachilde.

Then, in 1895, at her publisher's insistence, two novels appeared under the name Jean de Chilra, an anagram of Rachilde. This pseudonym had its own elaborate personality: a young male anarchist, treated as an entirely separate person. Rachilde herself wrote a lengthy and personal review of one of Jean de Chilra's novels, playing critic to her own alter ego. Neither book sold well, and by 1899 she was publishing exclusively as Rachilde again.

Late in life, she developed another explanatory fiction for her strangeness: that she was possessed by a werewolf. The séance and the werewolf served the same psychological function—they externalized her sense of being fundamentally different, inhabited by something that set her apart from ordinary humanity.

Why I Am Not a Feminist

In 1928, when she was sixty-eight years old, Rachilde published a monograph called Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe—"Why I Am Not a Feminist." The title has led some to dismiss her as a reactionary, but her actual position was more nuanced and perhaps more radical.

She had always acted as an individual, she said, not thinking to found a society or to upset the present one. This was not conservatism—she had spent her entire life upsetting the present society—but rather a refusal to be conscripted into any movement, even one that might seem to serve her interests.

She distrusted collective action because she distrusted collectives. She had built her own freedom through individual boldness, personal connections, and sheer audacity. The idea of women's liberation as a political movement was alien to her temperament and her experience. She had liberated herself; let other women do the same.

This was, of course, a profoundly privileged position. Not every woman had her talent, her connections, or her willingness to endure scandal. But it was consistent with everything else about her: she had made herself, and she believed others could and should do the same.

The Long Twilight

Rachilde remained socially active for most of her long life. Even in her sixties and seventies, she appeared around Paris with young men, generating rumors of adultery. But those who knew her understood that she had always preferred the company of gay men and men like Maurice Barrès, for whom there was pleasure in the torture of restraint. The relationships were probably more about performance and provocation than physical passion.

In 1935, when Rachilde was seventy-five, Alfred Vallette died at his desk at the Mercure de France offices. They had been married for forty-six years. Whatever their relationship had actually been—and the evidence suggests it was more professional partnership than romantic passion—his death ended an era. The Tuesday salons, which had run for more than fifty years, finally came to an end.

Her truly bohemian phase had ended with her marriage to Vallette in 1889. Her active social presence ended with his death in 1935. The final eighteen years of her life were quiet, a long withdrawal from the world she had once shocked and delighted.

On Saturday, April 4, 1953, in her Parisian apartment adjoining the offices of Mercure de France, Rachilde died at the age of ninety-three. She had outlived most of her friends, enemies, and scandals. The world had changed around her in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1884, when a novel about gender transgression could get you convicted of pornography. She had seen two world wars, the rise of fascism and its defeat, the beginning of decolonization, the atomic bomb.

Through it all, she had remained Rachilde—the Swedish nobleman, the man of letters, the werewolf, the woman who had made herself up entirely and refused to let anyone else define her.

The Legacy of Self-Invention

Rachilde's work has experienced periodic revivals of interest, particularly among scholars of gender studies and queer theory. Her novels, once scandalous, now seem remarkably prescient in their exploration of gender fluidity, sexual obsession, and the performance of identity.

But perhaps her most significant legacy is simply the life she lived. She was born unwanted, disabled, and female in a society that valued none of these things. She made herself into one of the most influential literary figures of her era through sheer force of will and a willingness to be outrageous.

She created herself from nothing—or rather, from a dead Swedish nobleman, a wolf, and whatever other fictions served her purpose. She proved that identity could be a work of art, and that the self was something you could make rather than something you were given.

This was radical in 1884. It remains radical today.