One of the most colorful and appealing figures in Parisian artistic and literary circles at the turn of the century—a period rich in flamboyant characters—was Marguerite àEymery, wife of Alfred Vallette (founder of the magazine Mercure de France) but known to her readers and fellow writers by her pen name Rachilde. Author of dozens of novels with provocative titles (The Marquise de Sade, The Sexual Hour) that dealt with bizarre sexual fantasies, she was condemned by respectable bourgeois society as a monster and hounded by the police as a pornographer, but revered by the literary world for her generosity in recognizing and encouraging new talent. The guardian angel of Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, Rachilde played a crucial role in advancing the cause of symbolist drama, herself contributing several of the earliest French plays in that new mode. As Alfred Jarry's closest friend and associate, she was instrumental in seeing that Lugné-Poe staged Ubu Roi. At a time when there were almost no women writers of any note in France, Rachilde was accepted as an intellectual equal by her peers. Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Remy de Gourmont, among many others, praised her talent and commented on the originality of her work.

Rachilde was also celebrated for her beauty, her enigmatic charm, her disconcerting wit. Sonnets were written about her greenish, cat-like eyes. Maurice Barrès nicknamed her Mademoiselle Baudelaire. According to Jean Lorrain, she was "very pale… rather thin, frail, with extremely small hands… and eyes—such eyes! Wide, wide, made heavy by unbelievable lashes, and clear as water." Her pallor, grave expression, inner fire, and outrageous imagination made Rachilde a perfect fin-de-siècle persona. Her career actually spanned almost an entire century. As an aspiring young teenage writer, she met Victor Hugo and received his blessing; when she died in 1953, Waiting for Godot was already playing at the Théâtre de Babylone.

Born in 1860 in Périgord (truffle country in Southwestern France), daughter of an army officer and, on her mother's side, descended from a Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Rachilde grew up in an isolated, bleak environment, cultivating the life of the imagination and obsessed with uncanny things. "She had always been improper," Barrès reports; "When she was still very young—erratic, generous, full of strange enthusiasms—she frightened her parents." She began writing stories at the age of twelve and was soon publishing them in local papers under various pseudonyms. By fifteen she had read the Marquis de Sade. Independent, emancipated, good at sports and handy with sword and pistol, Rachilde excelled in a world of men.

In 1878, the eighteen-year-old author came to Paris and began working as a journalist, writing for L'Ecole des Femmes, the first French women's magazine, directed by one of her cousins, where her first novels were published. At this point, given her limited financial resources, Rachilde decided to dress as a man in order to save money on clothes and also to facilitate her getting around Paris more easily as a reporter. She cut her hair short and sold her long tresses to Prince Romuald Gédroye, Grand Chamberlain of the Emperor Alexander II of Russia. On her visiting card she called herself: homme de letters (man of letters) and adopted the pseudonym Rachilde, supposedly the name of a medieval Swedish nobleman who spoke to her at a table-rapping seance.

In 1884, at the age of twenty-four, Rachilde achieved her first great success when a Belgian publisher brought out her decadent erotic novel, Monsieur Venus, whose virile and sadistic heroine, Raoule de Vénérande, keeps a pretty but stupid young working-class man as her mistress and systematically humiliates and torments him by turning him into a useless love object. After his death, Raoule keeps a wax statue of her late lover, adorned with certain real parts—teeth, nails, and hair—taken from the corpse. With its shocking inversions of accepted sex roles and its advocacy of the androgynous ideal (long before it became fashionable in symbolist circles), Monsieur Venus caused an immense scandal, not the least of all because it was written by an innocent-looking young lady who dressed as a man. Declared obscene, the book was prosecuted in Belgium where the court sentenced Rachilde to a large fine and two years in jail, punishment which the author avoided by not crossing the French-Belgian border. When the Parisian police came searching for copies, Rachilde was obliged to hide her stock of Monsieur Venus at the apartment of her friend Jean Moré as, a symbolist poet then in vogue. Because of Raoule de Vénérande and her curious predilections, Rachilde was even accused of having invented a new vice; whereupon Verlaine declared, "Ah, my dear child. If you have invented a new vice, you would be the benefactor of mankind."

Outspoken and passionate in defense of her literary comrades, particularly the weak and helpless, the author of Monsieur Venus won the respect of artists and writers by her loyalty, courage, and good humor. When Paul Verlaine, sick and battered, was evicted by his landlord and without a place to stay, Rachilde moved out of her apartment, turned it over to the ailing poet, and took care of him. Verlaine later dedicated a poem to this strange creature whom he called a diabolic angel or an angelic devil.

In 1889 Rachilde married Alfred Vallette. Within a year they had a daughter and started the Mercure de France, which soon became the principal literary magazine for the symbolists as well as a major publishing house, continuing to flourish until after World War II. An avid reader, Rachilde reviewed all new fiction and was quick to discover and support new talent (she was one of the first to recognize Colette's genius). The Mercure de France receptions that the Vallettes held every Tuesday in their home provided opportunities for young artists—among them Gide, Valéry, Ravel—to meet their elders and launch their careers. When he came to France in 1891, Oscar Wilde, who had received ideas for The Picture of Dorian Gray from Monsieur Venus, went to the Mercure de France to meet Rachilde, who—he was surprised to find—was not a demon, but a quite normal human being. At his trial in London four years later, Wilde's liking for Monsieur Venus was cited as evidence of his depravity; after his sentencing, Rachilde was one of the few to speak publicly in Wilde's favor. During Aubrey Beardsley's visit to Paris in 1897, it was Rachilde who took him under her wing and introduced him to the French artistic world; the descriptions in her Marquise de Sade are very similar in spirit to Beardsley's drawings.

The most famous of the Vallette's proteges was Alfred Jarry, who was a close friend of both husband and wife from the moment he first came to the Mercure de France in 1893 (making his debut, according to Rachilde, "like a wild animal entering the ring") until his death at the age of thirty-four in 1907. The Vallettes championed Jarry, published his works, and cared for him in his last poverty-stricken years. Not only did Rachilde keep Lugné-Poe firm in his resolve to produce Ubu Roi when he started to lose his nerve, she also shouted down the screaming demonstrators on the tumultuous opening night and told them to keep quiet.

Jarry's most revealing correspondence is addressed to Rachilde, and her book of affectionate reminiscences about their friendship, Alfred Jarry, or The Superatale of Lettres (1928), is a primary source of information about the author of Ubu Roi. Only the scurrilous Paul Leautaud, who worked at the Mercure de France and disliked Rachilde, implied—despite Jarry's homosexual tendencies—that the two were lovers. In fact, Rachilde was happily married to Vallette and led a conventional life. She and Jarry, whom she always addressed as "Père Ubu," were similar in temperament, endowed with the same peculiar sense of fantasy and humor, and they quite naturally found each other the best of companions. As a deadpan joker, Rachilde was able to rival and even best "Père Ubu." One day tired of hearing Jarry's boasting about his Gargantuan eating and drinking exploits, Rachilde proposed a raw-meat-eating contest and sent for two uncooked mutton chops, which they were to devour, fat and all, garnished only with pickles. Equipped with a strong stomach as well as mind, Rachilde methodically demolished her chop, drinking only her customary glass of water (she was a teetotaller), whereas "Père Ubu," even guzzling large quantities of his beloved absinthe, was unable to gag down the raw meat and left the table hastily overcome by a queasy feeling—although five years later he persuaded the gullible Guillaume Apollinaire (not a native-born Frenchman and therefore more easily hoaxed) that he lived exclusively on a diet of uncooked mutton. Not only gifted at Jarryesque horseplay, Rachilde could even write like Jarry if she was willing to make the effort. As the result of a bet between the two, she wrote Chapter VIII, La Peur chez l'amour (Fear's Visit to Love), of Jarry's L'Amour en visites (The Visits of Love) (1898) and did it so well that it has always been accepted until very recently as Jarry's.

Rachilde's own perverse and ghoulish fiction has often been said to be in bad taste, but in those pre-Freudian days by dealing with deviant sexual behavior (incest, homosexuality, bestiality) and violating deeply felt taboos, she was able to explore the unconscious and extend the boundaries of what could be treated in literature. Drawing upon themes and techniques from the decadent aesthetic, symbolism, and naturalism (movements which co-existed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century), Rachilde created novels and stories which are eclectic and highly personal, although essentially realistic studies in abnormal psychology and sexual psychopathology. As an artist she was obsessed with dreams and death, cruelty and the erotic. In his preface to The Demon of the Absurd (the collection of plays and fiction containing The Crystal Spider), Marcel Schwob points out that Rachilde penetrates—beyond cause and effect and the perceptible—into a realm of mysterious relationships and signs: "Rachilde's brain is equipped with antennae… With these delicate filaments, which extend her mental grasp, she scents death in the midst of love, the obscene in the midst of the normal, terror in the midst of peace and quiet. Like a cat on the watch, her ears prick up, and she hears the little mouse of death gnawing away at the wall, at our thoughts, at our flesh. And she stretches out her paw voluptuously to play with the little mouse of mortality."

Rachilde's plays, which include both grotesque comedy and horror drama, were frequently produced in small avant-garde theatres during the early 1890s. Her first work for the stage, the one-act anti-bourgeois satire, Call of the Blood, was given at the opening evening of Paul Fort's new symbolist-oriented Theatre d'Art in 1890, although it could equally as well have been appropriate for a program at the naturalistic Théâtre Libre. Call of the Blood presents the cozy after-dinner conversation of an idiotically self-satisfied middle class couple who remain indifferent to screams for help coming from someone in the street and congratulate themselves on being safe inside their apartment; only when the bloodied victim staggers through the door do they perceive that it was their own son who was being murdered under their window. Her second play, the three-act Madame Death (Gaugin did a frontispiece for the book edition), was given at Théâtre d'Art the following year. Called a cerebral drama by the author, the second "symbolist" act takes us inside the dying brain of the hero, a disgruntled artist who has committed suicide in the first act by smoking a poisoned cigar.

The Crystal Spider, with Lugné-Poe himself playing the role of Terror-Stricken, was presented in 1894 during the first season of the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre and was shown on tour in Copenhagen, Christiania, and Antwerp. In combining the twin symbolist themes of mirror and the double, The Crystal Spider reveals the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, so prevalent in France at the time via Baudelaire's translations. Rachilde conceives the fantastic not as a matter of supernatural agency, but of neurotic behavior, and probes the fears and anxieties of the hero who is suffering from catoptromania (obsession with mirrors). The shattered mirror becomes an image of how flaws in the personality determine where it will split under stress, as Freud will indicate a few years later, using the same basic metaphor: "If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure."

The one-act Salesman of the Sun, given at the Théâtre de la Rive Gauche in 1894, was one of Rachilde's best known plays. It deals with an imaginative but down-and-out street vendor, who having no other wares left sells passers-by a view of the sun setting over the Seine. Translated into Russian, Salesman of the Sun was on Meyerhold's list for production at the Theatre Studio in 1905-6, but was not given in Moscow until 1920 (with a different director). At the Sign of the Eagle, written in 1928 but unperformed, is a one-act comedy in which Rachilde supposes that Napoleon has escaped to America when a look-alike takes his place and is sent off to Saint-Helena, and now the man of destiny runs an inn in Philadelphia. During the nineteen thirties Rachilde had three new plays staged, two of these at the Grand Guignol, a fitting theatre for an author whose works reveled in the morbid and the macabre. The last of these productions, in 1938, was a version of one of Rachilde's first novels, The Tower of Love, a powerful study of human solitude written in 1899, and now adapted for the stage in collaboration with Marcelle Maurette, a highly talented woman playwright of the younger generation.