4. Pierre-Louis Duval (1811-1870) began as a butcher in Paris but went on to open twelve "economical" restaurants called "Bouillons Duval" because they originally served only bouillon (beef broth) and boiled beef. Later, in response to public demand, the menu was enlarged, and the low-priced restaurants continued to enjoy popularity into the twentieth century.
5. As as army officer, Rachilde's father, Joseph Eymery, had fought in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Although not wounded, he returned home deaf and pockmarked, having contracted smallpox while a prisoner of war in Hamburg.
6. Rachilde had some personal experience of arranged marriages. When she was only fourteen, she was engaged by her parents to an officer of her father's acquaintance. To avoid the marriage, Rachilde made a halfhearted attempt at suicide by throwing herself into a pond.
7. Mauve was Rachilde's favorite color, and it became the color of the cover of the Mercure de France.
8. The fabrication of liqueurs seems to be a hallmark of Rachilde's heroines. This passage is echoed in a later novel, Madame de Lydone, assassin (Paris: Ferenczi, 1929), in which the heroine also makes violet liqueur.
9. These prophetic words could be taken as a manifesto for Rachilde's own life, and anticipate the scandalized gossip she provoked in later life when she continued to lead an active social life. Claude Dau-phine, in particular, describes her "folle vieillese," and quotes the report of the concierge at the Mercure de France: "The frightening thing is to see Vallette let her run around everywhere, at night until four o'clock
in the morning, with all these young people of rather equivocal appearance." See Claude Dauphine, Rachilde: femme de lettres, 1900 (Pe-rigueux: Pierre Fanlac, 1985), 129.
Chapter Five
1. The phrase "ironie sanglante" (literally, "bleeding irony"), with its pun on "ironie cinglante" (stinging irony), obviously appealed to Rachilde; she had used it as the title of a novel published in 1891. Moreover, it is characteristic both of Rachildes punning style and her tendency to rework stock phrases and ideas over a long period.
2. The topos is a favorite one for Rachilde. In the last book she ever published, her memoires Quandj'etais jeune, "When I Was Young" (Paris: Mercure de France, 1947), she recalls her first visit to the actress Sarah Bernhardt, some seventy years previously. Guests received a somewhat bizarre reception, and Rachildes vivid desciption includes the detail of the front steps covered, despite the rain, by "a Smyrna carpet the terrible color of blood" (44).
3. Eliantes characteristic dimples were the subject of frequent references in earlier versions of The Juggler. Although the metaphor occurs less often in this text, it continues to recall Eliantes relationship to writing: her body is itself a text, while the source of verbal communication is set apart by parentheses.
4. Rachildes father had been disfigured by smallpox while a prisoner of war. This similarity, combined with the fact that mauve—the color of the wallet in which his portrait is kept—was also Rachildes favorite color, suggests that the portrait of Henri Donalger owes something to Colonel Eymery. Perhaps Eliantes attempts to free herself from the guilt and paralysing love for her dead husband, a relationship presented as verging on an obsession, represents Rachildes own attempts to exorcise the memories of her father and their inhibiting power.
5. Eliantes description of the path to passion evokes another allegory, Plato's allegory of the cave. Here the path which ascends from the cave of shadowy illusions to the light of truth is, in the words of Luce Irigaray, "full of traps, it is rocky and rugged, it can wound, tear, cut" (Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985, 283).
Chapter Six
i. "My lady ascends her tower," a line from the popular song "Marlbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre" (Marlborough is off to the war), said to date from the early eighteenth century. The verse continues "as high as she can go," echoed in Leon's next line.
Chapter Seven
i. Earlier editions of The Juggler specify that "Colmans" is not the guest's real name, despite his affinity for mustard. Instead, he had acquired this nickname "because of an old joke that no one remembered."
2. Perhaps an allusion to Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi, first performed in 1896. Rachilde had been instrumental in getting this play performed.
3. The mistake was especially easy to make in the case of jugglers (jongleurs). In addition to acrobatics, composing, and entertaining with songs and poems, female jongleurs "were routinely assumed to engage in prostitution," at least in the Middle Ages. See Joseph J. Duggan, "The Epic," in A New History of French Literature edited by Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 18-23.
Chapter Eight
1. "Je vous aime. Je t'aime." English has no equivalent to convey the transition from the formal "vous" form of address to the intimate "tu" form. Eliante first uses the informal "tu" in chapter 5, but both she and Leon alternate usage many times, marking the transitions between periods of intimacy and distance.
2. Eliante is here referring to her brother-in-law, but these generous sentiments also echo those of Rachilde herself. In the 1880s she gave refuge to the ailing poet Verlaine, vacating her apartment for him, and she and Vallette would be similarly unstinting in their generous support of Alfred Jarry.
3. The responsibilities of a "trottin" (literally, "one who trots")
would be similar to those of the modern "gopher," but the French term conveys more than a job description, being a term of moral and intellectual judgement.
4. In Pourquoi je ne suis pas feministe, "Why 1 am Not a Feminist" (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1928), Rachilde cites (among others) Teresa of Avila as an example of a women stricken by "the heavenly malady" (49). The same figure is analyzed by Jacques Lacan in his Le Seminaire, Livre xx: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), where he discusses Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa as a representation of jouissance.
5. Perhaps a reference to the Terror of 1793, and also to Victor Hugos novel Quatre-vingt-treize (1793). Rachilde had great respect for Hugo, who had encouraged her literary ambitions before she ever reached Paris.
6. Rachilde here anticipates the question that would be posed by Freud in his letter to Marie Bonaparte: "Was will das Weib," usually translated as "what do women want" (see Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 2. London, 1955, 468). Rachilde's formulation, however, being in the form of a statement and not a question, also anticipates the postmodern response that women cannot know what they want.
Chapter Nine
1. The panther was the subject of one of Rachilde's plays, and many of her contemporaries chose to see a self-portrait in her depiction of this animal.
2. According to French law, women always legally retain their unmarried name, even after marriage.
3. Rachilde was in fact born in i860. However, there was confusion, even among her friends, about her date of birth, so that even her obituary in Le Monde gives it as 1862.
4. This rank of nobility was something of an obsession for Rachilde, perhaps because her father was the illegitimate son of a marquis. Rachilde herself dressed up as a marquise for a fancy dress ball just before her marriage to Alfred Vallette, and he addresses her as "marquise" in his correspondence of this period. The marquise is also a com-
mon figure in Rachilde's fiction, with the "Marquise de Sade" being perhaps the best known. Both because of her aristocratic ancestry and through temperament, Rachilde was drawn to emblems of the ancien regime, and seems to have felt a certain spiritual affinity with the figure of the grande dame, the gracious noblewoman. Other traces of this predilection—in the form of references to Louis XIV, XV, and XVI— appeared in earlier versions of The Juggler, but were later edited out.
Chapter Ten
i. Again, the transition here is from the formal "vous" to the more intimate "tu," a nuance impossible to capture in English. See chapter 8, note i.
Chapter Twelve
i. A line from a popular song: "We'll go to the woods no mor
e, the laurels have been cut down." Les Lauriers sont coupes is also the title of a novel by Edouard Dujardin. It was originally published in the Revue Independente, a symbolist journal edited by Dujardin from 1886 to 1889. It was subsequently reissued by the Mercure de France in 1897 (the year in which The Juggler is set), and was reviewed by Rachilde in the August edition of the Mercure de France. Dujardin's novel may have influenced Rachilde, as it depicts a man torn bewteen a conscious ideal of platonic love and somewhat less conscious carnal desire. In addition, it is the first example of a novel in the form of an interior monologue, and James Joyce cited it as an influence in the composition of Ulysses. Les Lauriers sont coupes, like The Juggler, is therefore an important example of the symbolist roots of modernism.
2. St John's herb (eupatorium), also known as Devilfuge, was used to dispel witches and demons. The cult of St. John incorporated many mystical elements from pre-Christian tradition, and St. John's Eve (24 June) is the occasion for numerous magical rituals. See Hilderic Friend, Flower Lore, first printed in England in 1884 and reprinted in Rockport, MA by Para Research in 1981. Friend's encyclopedic collection of folklore suggests: "It seems as though almost every plant which
has any association with St. John has^also at some time or another been credited with the possession of supernatural powers, both among ourselves [in Britain], and especially on the Continent." (75).
3. Rachilde counted both a defrocked priest and a Spanish Grand Inquisitor among her ancestors. She also described her father as a "Don Juan" in her memoirs Quandfetais jeune.
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