Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Imagining Rachilde: Decadence and the roman a clefs

2005; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frf.2005.0018

1534-1836

Michael R. Finn,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Imagining RachildeDecadence and the Roman à Clefs Michael R. Finn In his extensive 1888 repertory of the roman à clefs, Fernand Drujon proposed a classification for the genre by century. Most 16 th century literature à clefs, for example, consisted of polemical writing on religious and political topics, while in the 17 th, the allegorical novel, interminable and more circumspect, brought increased polish to the genre. The 19 th century appeared to Drujon to absorb all previous typologies, "depuis le pamphlet révolutionnaire et la satire antireligieuse jusqu'aux parodies plus ou moins réussies de la vie publique et privée."1 Certainly, the great majority of romans à clefs are satirical, representing, as a recent compendium of papers on the subject phrased it, "[une] littérature souvent vacharde et haute en couleur."2 But as certain critics have stressed, the genre is not necessarily tendentious or parodic; it is in fact infinitely variable, intimidatingly protean.3 A roman à clefs can be a passionate love letter, as is the case for Olivia, a novel by the English writer Dorothy Bussy featuring and addressed to André Gide. Le Règne de la bête, by Adolphe Retté, reads as an apology to Edouard Drumont whom Retté had depicted insultingly in other works.4 And what is one to make of A la recherche du temps perdu, a sometimes parodic, but often seriously moralizing novel where the habit of juxtaposing the names of fictional characters with those of their real-life keys is meant as a play within a play, and a bow to one of Balzac's tics.5 The purpose of the present essay is to examine how three authors of the 1880 s employed the vehicle of the roman à clefs to portray aspects of the decadent writer Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery). As far as I am aware, none of these works—Décadence by Oscar Méténier, Une Décadente by Georges de Peyrebrune, and La Buveuse de sang by Louise Mie d'Aghonne—has ever been connected to Rachilde, though she did, of course, figure in the fiction of other authors of her time, and a number [End Page 81] of these sightings have been discussed. Practitioners of the roman à clefs would, in fact, have been derelict in their duty had they not featured the controversial Rachilde, labelled by one conservative commentator a hysteric and a hermaphrodite in need of institutionalization.6 Rachilde is the hypocritical, publicity-seeking writer Raclife in a bitter tract written by a woman who may have been her spurned lover, Gisèle d'Estoc.7 After Rachilde slapped the journalist Paul Devaux following a misogynistic public lecture, he portrayed her as the fellatrix of a gay male lover in a volume titled Les Fellatores.8 Rachilde plays a more respectable role as the unnamed female partner of Barrès' protagonist in Sous l'œil des barbares,9 and some feel she is the character Argine in the novel Saint-Front by writer Henri Barbot.10 Catulle Mendès, with whom she had a serious flirtation in the early 1880 s, would later be on the receiving end of a number of her jibes; he is described as a tasteless Don Juan in the preface to her novel A mort, appears in it as the blond poet Desgriel, "inventeur de tous les raffinements obscènes" (143), and in her Le Mordu he is the character Charles Désyrs.11 Mendès himself was an adept of the roman à clefs12 and one wonders if, in his novel of lesbianism Méphistophéla (1890), the name of his perverse heroine Sophor d'Hermelinge is not a deliberate, "dirty-linen" play on the name of Rachilde's pure heroine Hermione de Messiange in Minette, a novel that had appeared the year before. The always well-informed Jean Lorrain thought he knew the real-life model of Sophor, and his description suggests she might well have been Rachilde: "[Méphistophéla] n'était encore que la très inquiétante et très svelte jeune femme à tête impertinente de boy, au pétillant esprit de gavroche."13 But why investigate what are now obscure references in the works...