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ABSTRACT
This article examines distressing images of dead infants in several novels by Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860–1953), principally La Princesse des ténèbres of 1896 in order to emphasize the failure of walls to prevent seepage. Examples range from domestic walls that leach arsenic to uterine walls that slough blood. These fictional images of decomposition suggest a parallel porosity in the generic walls that separate fiction and biography, leading to speculation as to whether any of these fictional representations have grounding in autobiographical experience. The article also presents new biographical information about Rachilde's relationship with Louis-Pilate de Brinn’Gaubast and Léo d’Orfer (Marius Pouget) to fill certain silences (and Silences) in Rachilde's work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Melanie Hawthorne is Cornerstone Professor of French at Texas A&M University, in the United States. She is best known for her work on Rachilde, and specializes in the decadent period and women writers. In 2013 she published The Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d’Estoc, a biographical project that attempts to demystify and defend humanities research. Her current writing projects focus on the Belle Époque writer Renée Vivien (1877–1909).
Notes
1 The preference is manifested in the popularity of the spoof poetry book Les Déliquescences d’Adoré Floupette of Citation1885 by Beauclair and Vicaire, supposedly published in ‘Byzance’, but also in the much-quoted remark by Théophile Gautier in his preface to Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal that Byzantine style is basically ‘l’art grec tombé en déliquescence (Greek art fallen into deliquescence)’ (Gautier, Citation1868: 17).
2 On images of the maternal in Rachilde, see for example Bollhalder Mayer (Citation2002), especially Chapter 3, ‘L’Horreur du mariage’; Holmes (Citation2001), especially Chapter 6, ‘Motherless Daughters: Rachilde's Women’; and Luckacher (Citation1994), especially Chapter 3, ‘“Mademoiselle Baudelaire”: Rachilde and the Sexual Difference’.
3 I have explored the question of Rachilde's complicated relationship with her mother at length in my book Rachilde and French Women's Authorship (Hawthorne, Citation2001).
4 See his diary (Brinn’Gaubast, Citation1997).
5 Confusingly, this journal was called La Pléiade, a name that had been used a few years earlier by Rodolphe Darzens, so that Brinn’Gaubast also became embroiled in a quarrel over ownership of the title, thus adding to his troubles.
6 See Brinn’Gaubast (Citation1997) and Lefrère's richly informative Préface (Citation1997).
7 Arsenic in wallpaper was a real threat to public health in the nineteenth century. See Whorton, especially Chapter 8, ‘Walls of Death’ (Citation2010: 203–28).
8 See Hawthorne (Citation2001), especially ‘The Cultural Injunction to Silence’, pp. 48–62.
9 For more on the unspoken but implied threats and sexual dangers and their possible basis in biography, see Finn (Citation2009).
10 For further analysis of Rachilde's narrative strategy in this novel, see Staron (Citation2015), Chapter 2 section 4.
11 See also Elizabeth Emery's analysis of Rachilde's short story, ‘La Dent’ (Citation2016). The narrator loses a tooth which she proceeds to bury and mourn, but in light of the strong cathexis to the lost tooth, the loss of a body part from the mouth could just as easily be read as a loss from a lower cavity (in a Freudian displacement), the womb (or vagina, especially since that part of female anatomy is so often imagined as ‘dentata’, or endowed with teeth). ‘La Dent’ is in the collection Le Démon de l’absurde, along with ‘La Scie’, discussed below.
12 Those without small children in their household might not know this book. The story runs that ‘If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw’ (Numeroff, Citation1985). And so it goes, until, at the end, the mouse asks for a glass of milk … and a cookie to go with it, and you are back where you started.
13 For more on Rachilde's attitudes toward Alfred Vallette, see her letters to Georges de Peyrebrune in Correspondance. Rachilde writes, for example: ‘J’ai beau être intime avec lui et l’écouter souvent, je ne le comprends jamais et il me fait l’effet quand même d’un étranger. C’est un Monsieur pour moi, rien de plus’ (Peyrebrune, Citation2016: 71–72). This letter dates from around April 1889, and one could argue that Rachilde later ‘warmed up’ to him. Conversely, one could also argue that the admission of ‘intimacy’ means that Vallette was the father of her child.
14 I believe this is what Pierre Pommarède is alluding to when he states that ‘C’est peut-être à cette époque [1876], suivant des traditions familiales, que se situe une fugue de Rachilde en compagnie d’un quadragénaire, M. d’Orfer’ citing as his source the Archives Romana Severini Brunori (Pommarède, Citation1993: 802 n.75). Pommarède is clearly misinformed about d’Orfer's age (he was hardly any older than Rachilde).
15 What makes it possible to date this to 1884 – in addition to the obvious fact that the book was published then – is the fact that the words are inscribed in a cahier d’exercices (preserved in the Fonds Jacques Doucet) shortly after the transcription of a letter (to ‘Monsieur d’Orfer’) dated September 1884. Rachilde, ‘cahier d'exercices’ (‘suite des lettres galantes de Mimi-Corail’), Fonds Jacques Doucet, Ms 22091, feuille 29, recto.
16 They collaborated on two handwritten issues of L’Exposition sans chemise that appeared in Périgueux in 1879 (facsimile copy in private collection).
17 Quoted in the obituary ‘Léo d’Orfer’ (Citation1924: 3).
18 He was equally unreliable when it came to publishing the work of others. See Mallarmé (Citation1965, II: 255). D’Orfer was supposed to publish an edition of Mallarmé's ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, but somehow never got around to it.
19 ‘J.-L.’ in L’Ordre of January 1939, quoted in Digot (Citation1995: 20).
20 I know of one person who claims to have seen a reference on the internet to a copy in a provincial French library, but that person is now unable to find that reference again, nor to remember in which library it was.
21 Rachilde, ‘Coupures de presse, 1877–1891.’ Fonds Jacques Doucet, Ms 20926, feuille 33, recto.
22 For more on the role of silence in decadent texts, see Guyaux (Citation2008).