2024-01-22 13:35:00
Time.news “Proud of Letters” fileEvery month, the National Library of France highlights a work by a little-known writer, to be downloaded free of charge in Gallica. Today, Rachilde, prolific author of sulphurous works and founder of “Mercure de France” with Alfred Vallette.
If “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” often evokes Jeanne Duvalthe lover of the famous poet of Le Spleen de Paris, it is not her that Maurice Barrès refers to, but a certain Rachilde who did not fail to cause a scandal from a young age with a confusing work: Monsieur Vénus.
Marguerite Eymery was born in Périgord on February 11, 1860. She was the only child of a career military father, Joseph Eymery, and a mother, Gabrielle Feytaud, counted among her ancestors Brantôme and the Grand Inquisitor Dom Faytos. Joseph being a penniless bastard, the marriage is considered by the young woman’s parents as a misalliance. Second disappointment, the couple has a daughter and not a male. Marguerite, often left to her own devices, grows up as a tomboy, observes bourgeois hypocrisy, the harshness of the peasants, the disintegration of the parental couple. This self-taught education was completed by reading the works of the Marquis de Sade stolen from his father’s library. The family context acts on the little girl like a personal curse which will nourish her future novels. The distressing nature of his childhood serves as an evil backdrop to several of his writings and the rumor of a lycanthropic ancestor will give him a taste for hybrid creatures. Everything is in the making in the Cros home and the little girl is imbued, despite herself, with stubborn traumas as evidenced by the news the Frog Killer or the novel Its Spring.
And Marguerite met Rachilde
It was her maternal grandmother’s penchant for spiritualism that gave Marguerite the opportunity to encounter the specter of the man who left her one of these pen names, Rachilde, a Swedish gentleman from the 16th century. The young lady, galvanized by this usurpation of a ghost, submits her first writings to the Echo of the Dordogne. From the age of 17, she published short stories and short stories, some of which already reflect his taste for the bizarre. Fascinated by Victor Hugo, she dares to send him her text First Love. The famous writer responds in a brief missive “Thanks, applause. Courage, miss”. But that was without counting the pitfalls sown by maternal jealousy. Her mind already altered by madness, Gabrielle Feytaud helps to confuse the identity of the early novelist by claiming that the texts are written by others. But “the young girl quickly discovered the naughty game and this is how, in agreement with her father, she left Périgord for Paris.
“Monsieur Vénus”, the scandalous success
In the preface to A mortRachilde reveals some adventures from her first years in Paris: his meeting with Sarah Bernhardt, thanks to her cousin Marie de Saverny, director of women’s schoolwho helped him publish his first novel Mr. Noveltyor, more sordid event, the unauthorized attacks by the director of the daily newspaper l’Estafette.
It was in the 1880s that she decided to free herself from this obviously patriarchal society: she wore a man’s costume following authorization from the Paris Prefecture, cut her brown hair and published her first business card. : “Rachilde, man of letters”. Cross-dressing allows him to finally reveal his sulphurous heroines. In 1884 appeared Monsieur Venus, materialist novel. This story narrates the passion between the effeminate Jacques Silvère and the dominatrix Raoule de Vénérande who literally makes him her doll. This inverted couple aroused controversy as well as admiration. Rachilde’s career was launched: the book was banned by the Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office, a seizure was organized by the Paris Court, Louis II of Bavaria and Barbey d’Aurevilly were won over. Rachilde’s scandalous fame was definitively made when Maurice Barrès signed the preface to the reissue in 1889. What follows will be a horde of heroines gifted with the most subtle perversions to achieve an impossible and pure love as in The Marquise de Sade.
Read “Monsieur Venus” on Gallica
Rachilde the salamander
This feminine Huysmans is a prolific author but it would be simplistic to limit her only to her decadent writings. Rachilde is not a prisoner of the mores of the Parisian literary world but knows how to recognize and defend artists who are often ridiculed: she hosts Verlaine, defends Alfred Jarry, supports Oscar Wilde. Wisely, she chose the reassuring Alfred Vallette as her husband and embarked with him on the adventure of publishing Mercure de France. She holds her famous Tuesday literary salon there and writes columns in the magazine of the same name. Editor, literary critic, benefactress, the character is not without contradiction: she who chooses emancipation from a very young age but cursed the suffragettes ; she invents misandrous female characters but finds points in common with the stronger sex. With a strong nationalist feeling, she took refuge in the countryside during the two world wars near animals, far from men.
Rachilde is a salamander, as Jean Lorrain affectionately calls her : twilight animal which knows how to bring back to life what has disappeared. Published novels are often “regrowths” of previously written fiction. But multiplication is not redundancy: from one novel to another, from short story to short story, it explores ever more the desire for the absolute and the complexity of existence beyond the question of genre. Even Léautaud, whom Rachilde meets on rue Condé, the headquarters of Mercure, is not very friendly towards her, having become old and undoubtedly overtaken by maternal dementia, recognizes her inexhaustible strength. In a article from Franc-tireur : “She says: people say that I didn’t get the place I deserved. Let’s admit, but whatever, I had the place I made for myself.” A good alternative to Sarah Bernhardt’s “all the same”.
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