So far from constituting a threat to "good" moral values of the belle époque, the offbeat French novel of the 1880s and 1890s, often subtitled "Parisian Manners" or even "Foreign Manners" and regularly kept under surveillance by the civil and literary police concerned about its depravity, actually promulgated a message and an ethic founded to a great extent on those very values it appeared to bring under attack. Bourgeois life during the Third Republic had done a rather good job of hiding its seamier side beneath the dignity of bearded faces and the amplitude of feminine attire. Certain novelists such as Oscar Méténier, Dubut de La Forest, Jean Lorrain, and the young Rachilde devoted considerable talent and energy to peeling off these false beards and pulling up those skirts a bit further than was deemed permissible. The images of this lovely society that have come down to us through Nadar's legacy of charming photographs and Gustave Caillebotte's and Jean Beraud's meticulous canvases have been somewhat impugned—raped, some might say—by these iconoclastic novelists and a host of even lesser-known colleagues.

The rehabilitation of Jean Lorrain's work has gotten well underway over the past fifteen years or so, primarily because of the efforts of the late Philippe Jullian and those of Pierre Kyria, Christian Berg, and Michel Desbruères, among others. It now appears to be the turn of his contemporary and faithful friend, Rachilde. Since 1984, a number of major studies of this author have come from Claude Dauphine, Micheline BesnardCoursodon, Robert Ziegler, and Melanie Hawthorne, all of them decisively underscoring a shift in critical approach characterized by rigorous and sustained objectivity. From these nevertheless diverse evaluations a common premise emerges: that readers, especially males, should guard against jumping to the conclusion that the stratagems of Rachilde's protagonists are perverse. A person such as Raoule de Vénérande, heroine or hero, as one may choose to think, of the novel Monsieur Vénus, or another such as Mary Barbe, the "Marquise de Sade" of the novel by the same name, are likely to seem perverse if the reader refuses to understand that their attitudes and actions reveal, in the final analysis, that Western society has almost always adopted a double standard in judging human conduct. The person who begins to think and act in a manner fitting the stereo-type of the opposite sex may seem perverse for having dared tamper with prevailing standards. What is true for many of Rachilde's most "shocking" female characters also holds true for a man such as Paul-Eric de Fertzen, one of the major characters of her novel Les Hors-nature, whom Huysmans, in an unpublished letter to Rachilde, described as "une sirène dextrement campée" ("a skillfully presented siren"). But the question is a much broader one; far from being limited to patterns of dress and physical mannerisms, the reversal of traditionally recognized male and female roles extends to intellectual attitudes and to reasoning, two realms in which much more serious reader disorientation is likely to occur.

Until very recently, literary critics have almost universally relegated Rachilde's work to the backwaters of modern French letters. In his history of French literature published just after World War II and seven years before Rachilde's death, Henri Clouard pigeonholed her in the "coin des démoniaques" ("the demonics' corner"). As Melanie Hawthorne has rightly pointed out in her article on gender roles in Monsieur Vénus, the scorn that critics have heaped upon Rachilde even in very recent times is almost invariably based upon the erroneous perception that her novels are little more than gratuitous descriptions of monstrous sexual deviations. Maurice Barrès, writing, presumably in way of promotion, the preface to the first French edition of Monsieur Vénus in 1889, had the dubious honor of being the first to shunt critics off in this direction. Our perspective one hundred years later allows for a somewhat more objective appraisal of the alleged perversities which we see as the radical means adopted by Rachilde to condemn what she perceived as equally monstrous abuses of women's rights, the principles of patriotism, honor, marriage, and a host of other cornerstones of French and Western civilization. By enthralling—or disgusting—us with the excesses of her heroes and heroines, Rachilde deftly suggests, and without being in the least didactic, that these "monsters" of hers have been produced not so much by bourgeois principles as by the shameless perversion of these values by men and women who proclaim themselves to be the defenders of the nation, women's honor, the family, and so forth. The more outrageous the abuse seems to Rachilde the more she ups the ante by inventing characters and aberrations that for her time were definitely beyond the pale.

In her novels published between 1880 and 1900, Marguerite Eymery, writing under the pseudonym Rachilde as well as the anagram of this pseudonym, Jean de Chilra, applied her talents to the parody, not so much of bourgeois values as of their abuse at the hands of a vicious and hypocritical society. With such slaps in society's face as Monsieur Vénus (1884), La Marquise de Sade (1887), and Les Hors-nature (1897), Rachilde espoused both feminist and homosexual causes, as well as the cause of "honest" people, supposing there were any. Love, country, conjugal fidelity, maternity, and paternity are targets of Rachilde's satire only to the extent that these values have been flouted by hosts of such preposterous puppets as those exemplified by the regiment under the command of Mary Barbe's father on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war; or by heads of families who parade their conjugal infidelity before others; or by parents who are incapable of setting for their children the example of a united and loving couple. The dearth of real parents is underscored by the large number of orphans, semi-orphans, and bastards in Rachilde's early novels. Raoule de Vénérande, the heroine of Monsieur Vénus, is without parents; and the precociously cruel young woman labeled the "Marquise de Sade" (Mary Barbe) is the legitimate fruit of a union so corrupted by hypocrisy and irresponsibility that she grows up very much on her own. Her painful childhood is little more than the uninterrupted observation of the cruelty, pettiness, and duplicity of adults. Continually uprooted by the clocklike reassignments of her father's regiment, the child will come to know but a single important emotional anchor, and that is her innocent but already sadistic love for a poor working-class boy who is, of course, a real orphan. After this helter-skelter upbringing, completely devoid of parental affection, Mary is at length emancipated by the death of her parents and married at the age of eighteen to a Parisian aristocrat, a fastliving baron who at forty thinks he has had enough of the company of money-grubbing courtesans. On their wedding night, the young baroness loses no time avenging herself of her father's lack of affection and innumerable despicable actions; she informs her husband that she will never love him, nor will she grant him the hope of a legitimate heir:

Oh, I have some strange theories, but you must resign yourself to them, Sir. It so happens that I don't care to create others who will suffer some day as I've suffered… . As for this God-given maternity bestowed on every girl who surrenders to her husband, well, I exhaust its tremendous tenderness at the sacred moment that leaves us still free not to procreate, free not to bestow death while bestowing life, free to exempt from filth and despair one who has done nothing to merit such fate. Let me put it to you cynically: I don't choose to be a mother, first of all because I don't want to suffer, and next because I don't wish to cause suffering.

Having taken such a position, she quickly adopts imperious attitudes towards everyone about her and gains authority over some, including an elderly uncle who had been her guardian before her marriage. This distinguished Parisian scientist and professor of medicine will opt for suicide as a result of the carefully dosed torture administered by his former charge who had applied herself first to seducing her uncle, then to rejecting him disdainfully.

In Mary Barbe's protest against a phallocratie society, a dual goal rapidly becomes apparent: first, to wreak vengeance on the male of the species; second, to cast off all bonds of servitude or any attitude perceived as such. According to the novelistic focus Rachilde proposes, the reader is expected to take Mary Barbe as the real victim, who in turn makes victims of her own in the name of all women. The author generally chooses as the butt of ridicule pompous, even stupid men wholly lacking the finesse of sentiment and tormented intelligence with which she so generously endows her heroines. The Marquise de Sade indeed triumphs, but over male creatures so naive and abject that her victory scarcely deserves that name. The tactics in this one-sided struggle are the very ones that had been employed by young Mary's cat Minoute, who scratched and drew her little mistress's blood. Robert Ziegler, in his study of this novel, has underscored the importance of the cat's claws which allow for "cutting, scratching, stabbing [that] can be done more surreptitiously." The mores of this supposedly domesticated animal, preserving as they do a certain savagery, admirably sum up the case of Mary Barbe.

As for the imbrication of bourgeois values in all these diabolical arts, it would be difficult to cite a better example than the love affair of Raoule de Vénérande and Jacques Silvert in Monsieur Vénus. As BesnardCoursodon has rightly observed: "Non seulement la 'normalité' hétérosexuelle est effacée" ("not only is heterosexual 'normality' wiped out")—since Raoule plays the man's role and Jacques the woman's—but homosexuality too is "dépassée par la perversion, qui est complète… [et] qui rétablit l'apparence d'un couple 'normal' [minant] en fait la norme de la nature" ("exceeded by perversion, which is complete… [and] which restores the appearance of a 'normal' couple, thus in fact [subverting] nature's norm"). It should be added, however, that the very fact that Rachilde is aiming here at an appearance of normality, even in parody, brings us back to a kind of bourgeois equilibrium, since the two roles are reversed. Heterosexuality of a sort is indeed preserved, but at what a price! The self-criticism implied in the very nature of parody, since it allows for reinterpretation of what it has itself proposed, would seem to apply here, as in other "outrageous" situations concocted by Rachilde. By attacking abuse with abuse she underscores one of the tenets of Decadence.

Mary Barbe, at the opposite pole from Raoule de Vénérande and in a less dramatic way, joins forces with bourgeois values through her almost total lack of visible revolt against appearances and ritual. She does not flaunt her incestuous liaison with her husband's bastard son; she does go into mourning for her elderly uncle whom she has effectively pushed into suicide—she always takes into account what other people will say, just as any submissive woman of her day would do. This feline-woman relishes her cruel pleasures all the more that they remain secret ones. By pursuing a line of conduct that is the opposite of Raoule de Vénérande's, by dissimulating her true feelings and motives, this young Marquise de Sade actually seems, to those who know her only superficially, to be very much like the bourgeois and aristocratic women for whom she actually harbors nothing but scorn. In the true tradition of the bourgeois who desire nothing more than to distinguish themselves from other bourgeois, Mary Barbe gives this somewhat ironic turn of the screw by striving to make her mendacious conformity the sine qua non of her secret revolt. The transvestite note that creeps into several scenes of La Marquise de Sade is a much more obvious theme in Monsieur Vénus and Les Hors-nature. As is the case in many of Jean Lorrain's novels, transvestism, so far from being an exceptional element, is rather the expression of a tendency which in fin-de-siècle literature approached something like an artistic fashion. "Fin de siècle, fin de sexe" ("end of century, end of sex") Jean Lorrain cynically opined. His brash quip at least has the merit of suggesting quite succinctly the sacrifices to an aesthetic mode that d'Annunzio and Debussy, among others, were prepared to make in their Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, incarnated not by a man but by a bosom less, boyish Ida Rubenstein. Similar sacrifices at the same altar were frequently and willingly performed by Richard Strauss, whose predilection for mezzo-sopranos in men's garb is confirmed in some of his finest operas, such as Der Rosenkavalier (in which there is even travesty of disguise in the first and third acts), Arabella, and Ariadne auf Naxos. In passing, let us not forget the example of Sarah Bernhardt as the Aiglon or as Pierrot. Paintings of this period frequently follow a similar course in the frail personages of indeterminate sex who preside, often with hieratic gestures, over the melancholy or cataclysmic scenes conceived by Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. Joséphin Péladan also adds a pseudoscientific note with his dissertations on the androgyne. But in all his theoretical poses, Sâr Péladan seems more attuned to asexuality than to bisexuality. And that is precisely one of the messages that Jean Lorrain was attempting to convey with his stinging rejoinder: "Finde siècle, fin de sexe. " He doubtless also had in mind other more popular and more concrete manifestations of sexual indecision and confusion: for example, masked balls, carnival, and the ever more brazen exhibitionism of the Miss Sacripants that Proust would soon describe in studying aspects of Odette de Crécy and her kind, such as Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Romaine Brooks, Colette, and the famous "amazone" Natalie Clifford Barney.

The other side of the coin in matters of disguise shows the effigies of such characters as Adelsward de Fersen, the hero of a future novel by Roger Peyrefitte, L'Exilé de Capri; vaporous Pierre Lotis; and many another Baron de Charlus bent on putting the dogs on the wrong scent. As literary subjects, the coin was to prove to be worth its weight in gold in the closing years of the nineteenth century. And Rachilde, more resolutely and earlier than most, set about exploiting this vein of gold, or perhaps of quicksilver, more properly speaking. Indeed, well before Jung she seized on the importance of the symbolism of Mercurius, creating as she did a menagerie of intriguing monsters, all of whom possess that antinomian dual nature that Jung has analyzed as basic to Mercurius and in which the masculine and the feminine elements undergo strange metamorphoses. In a Jungian archetypal reading of the three Rachilde novels previously mentioned, one is impressed by the manner in which she exploits the Mercurius symbol, whether consciously or otherwise. The fundamental dualism of the principal characters stands out first and foremost, followed by their interdependence and the role reversibility of each of the members of the three couples in question.

It will be recalled that in Monsieur Vénus the couple is composed of an imperious young woman with masculine bearing, Raoule de Vénérande, and the all-too-handsome Jacques Silvert, whom she seduces, subjugates and effectively turns into her "mistress." In La Marquise de Sade, Mary Barbe, after having married a baron whom she proceeds to tame on their wedding night, as we have seen, loses no time seducing his bastard son, a young medical student. She quickly reduces the latter to near total dependency, playing with him and his emotions like a cat with a mouse. For his willpower and ambition she substitutes and imposes incestuous pleasures that she seasons with sadistic and vampiric condiments. His whole existence is soon circumscribed by the sphere of satisfaction of their sexual appetites. Femme fatale if ever there was one, Mary Barbe uses her fingernails like a cat's claws to exact their toll in the couple's caresses. In her secret, nocturnal visits to the apartment where she keeps her male victim—reversing once again the more prevalent arrangement—her thirst for his blood truly designates her as the incarnation of the "Sirè ne repue" ("Satiated Siren") depicted by the turn-of-the-century artist Gustav Adolphe Mossa.

Finally in Les Hors-nature the couple in question is composed of the two brothers, Reutler and Paul-Eric de Fertzen. Like his father a Prussian, Reutler has been striving all his life to repress his homosexual tendencies through total abstinence. He is tall, well-built, and of a very sober demeanor. On the other hand, his younger brother, Paul-Eric, who was born in France during the 1870 war, has inherited the fragile beauty of their French mother, who died in childbirth. Realizing quite early that Paul-Eric's temperament is much too feminine, the elder brother devotes his life and their considerable fortune to educating Paul-Eric in what he takes to be the "proper" manner, that is to say he throws the adolescent boy into the arms of Parisian courtesans and Egerias with the expectation of remedying his lack of virile attributes. But through the bewilderingly improbable developments of this drama, the younger brother's true nature remains unshaken and in the end wins out over such paltry remedies. He becomes more effeminate with each passing day. Reutler, himself the victim of his double betrayal of nature, is forced to recognize that his own punishment is to have fallen hopelessly in love with his brother. Much like Raoule de Venerande and Mary Barbe, Reutler has up to this point always associated the concept of true love with abstinence. This man—whose firmness of purpose and manner and whose self-denial holds others at bay—could well subscribe tacitly to the motto carved over Mary Barbe's bed: "Aimer, c'est souffrir" ("To love is to suffer"). But Reutler goes further still, and, in the final expression of his overpowering and desperate love for his brother, effectively transforms the motto into: "Aimer, c'est mourir" ("To love is to die"). Everything exacerbates the awkward situation which for too long a time has prevailed between the brothers in their strange and estranged existence in the lonely family castle; to go on living in this way under the same roof is out of the question, as is a return to Paris and its follies. For this improbable and chaste couple with their dreams of the impossible only one solution remains, and that is to disappear in an apotheosis worthy of Die Gàtterdammerung, the conflagration of their isolated Valhalla. In a letter to Rachilde, Huysmans dubs this denouement "sardanapalesque"; then, in a rather long and flattering enumeration of the qualities he discovers in this novel, he warmly congratulates the author on having created such a character as Reutler: "Car celui-là vous l'avez animé d'une sorte de souffle mystérieux et d'une grandeur épique … il reste inoubliable, avec son air souffrant, son rictus, ses yeux d'eau noire, toute l'énigme de son orgueil. Il emporte tout dans son sillage car il apparaît comme inconnu avant vous, comme jamais vu" ("for you have endowed this character with a kind of mysterious breath and an epic grandeur… he is unforgettable with his suffering attitude, his gaping grin, his liquid black eyes, and the whole enigma of his pride. He sweeps aside everything in his path; he appears like something that was unknown before you, like something never seen before"). A most flattering comment, to be sure, but not quite exact. A similar love that "sweeps aside everything in its path" can be found in a previous novel by Rachilde, entitled, as it happens, A Mort (1886). The heroine, Berthe Soirès, attempts as Reutler does, to reinvent love, is overwhelmed by her superhuman effort, wastes away and dies in a kind of Liebestod.

In choosing to give the protagonists of Les Hors-nature the names Reutler and Paul-Eric de Fertzen, Rachilde seems to allude somewhat obliquely to the many rebuffs and disappointments suffered by her contemporary, count Adelsward de Fersen, a most celebrated example of the "bric-à-brac gréco-préraphaélitico modern' style"—Cocteau dixit—that provided cocktail conversation topics and tabloid "scoops" around the turn of the century. Jean Lorrain, too, had a nose for such game and was obviously fascinated by it, as evidenced in several of his journalistic pieces and short stories that beat around the subject of Adelsward de Fersen's life style without, however, quite daring to tackle the matter of homosexuality directly. The same timidity did not keep him from treating the subject of lesbianism, as evidenced in his novel Maison pour dames, a story whose intrigue hinges on the competition for a literary prize to be awarded to a woman poet and on the recruitment procedures used to attract applicants. Again because of a dual standard working in reverse, as it were, and for once to the woman's advantage, can we really be surprised that the intrepid Rachilde, the same young woman that Lorrain addresses in a letter as "Chère Hermaphrodite" (Dear Hermaphrodite") approaches the subject of homosexuality with relative ease in Les Hors-nature? From the beginning of her appearance on the literary scene she had resolutely decided to throw off her provincial origin and to hitch her wagon to the Parisian star. Claude Dauphine has expressed it most forcefully: "Cette intrusion de 'La Fille aux yeux d'or' chez 'Eugénie Grandet' est révélatrice de l'optique de Rachilde: plutôt Sodome et Gomorrhe qu 'une sous-prefecture. Hors de Paris, point de vie!" ("This intrusion of 'The Girl with the Golden Eyes' into Eugenie Grandet's domain is revealing of Rachilde optics: Better to be in Sodom and Gomorrah than in some provincial backwater. Outside of Paris, nothing doing!")

Equivocal dualism, interdependence, reversibility of gender roles: these are the three characteristics associated in these three novels of Rachilde with sensual and physical love, as is the spirit Mercurius in his metaphysical and incorporeal sense. Jung tells us that "for the alchemists, as we know not only from the ancient but also from the later writers, Mercurius as the arcane substance had a more or less secret connection with the goddess of love" and that in certain representations "Aphrodite appears with a vessel from the mouth of which pours a ceaseless stream of quicksilver." Other aspects of this spirit emphasized by Jung and that are striking in Rachilde's protagonists are a "many-sided, changeable, and deceitful" nature and the fact that this spirit "enjoys equally the company of the good and the wicked. "

As a woman writer, then, Rachilde could doubtless afford to treat a subject such as Les Hors-nature, if not with impunity then at least without too much fear of reprisal from a certain literate public, the very one that showed far less tolerance of Jean Lorrain's sallies onto the same terrain. And Rachilde's relatively more favorable treatment was due not solely to the fact that she was a woman, but was in even larger part due to the narrative voice she adopts, permitting preservation of a certain distance and objectivity, two advantages that Jean Lorrain's much more personal style is surely lacking, his La Maison Philibert being a prime example. The exceptional adventures of the two de Fertzen brothers in Les Hors-nature may astound or intrigue us; they can not move us, let alone give the illusion of real events, as do Lorrain's novels. It is precisely this detachment and this hypothetical bent that allowed Rachilde to tackle broad matters of human behavior in general, and of sexuality in particular, without bringing down storms of critical invective as Lorrain did. Among her many merits as a novelist, more recognition is due her for having dared to put her finger squarely on an area of widespread medical error in the late nineteenth century, one that caused endless problems for such individuals as the young André Gide and for Marcel Proust throughout his life: "La névrose, la monomanie? Cela n 'existe qu 'en faisant dévier une creature de sa ligne. " ("Neurosis and monomania? They come about only by causing a creature to deviate from its bent"), she wrote in Les Hors-nature. It is understood here that the bent is homosexuality; in Reutler de Fertzen's case without a trace of effeminate mannerism, in that of his brother, exaggerated effeminacy. Reutler finally grasps, but much too late, the fact that from the outset he should have accepted his own nature as well as his brother's, without attempting to "correct" them. "N'estil pas bien plus contre la nature, " he says, "de résister désespérément à ses instincts?" ("Is it not much more unnatural to resist desperately one's instincts?"). An affirmative answer to his question is given in dramatic fashion through the disastrous events recorded in the final pages of this novel.