The juggler Read online

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  For my family

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people and institutions: Ross Chambers, for his suppott and advice; Patricia Baudoin, Dominique Fisher, and Catherine Ploye, for their assistance in unraveling textual knots; my outside readers, for their helpful comments and suggestions; the National Endowment for the Humanities, for the opportunity to attend a summer seminar for college teachers, which helped clarify my thinking about many aspects of this text; Luis Costa, for his support and general encouragement; and last, but not least, Leslie Mitchner, for her confidence in the inherent value of this project.

  retorted that if indeed Rachilde had succeeded in inventing a new vice, she would have been the benefactor of society. 2 Whatevet the subversive nature of Monsieur Venus (and the debate goes on), 3 the impact of the novel guaranteed Rachilde a faithful following. For several decades, a generation of readers and writers greeted each of her publications with enthusiasm.

  Her early success can be attributed both to her independent spirit, enhanced by an unusual upbringing, and to her early apprenticeship to writing and determination to make it her career.

  Rachilde was born Marguerite Eymery on 11 February i860, at her family's home just outside the town of Perigueux in southwest France. Her provincial origins subsequently exercised great influence on her life and work. Although she lived in Paris from the age of twenty-one until her death in 1953 at the age of ninety-three, she never lost the ability to see society through the eyes of a "provincial," an outsider. (The present example, The Juggler, is no exception: the heroine is a Creole whose marked difference sets her apart from the rest of society, and enables her to comment with detachment on Parisian high society.)

  The atmosphere of the family home at Le Cros, together with family lore, gave Rachilde a highly developed sense of the gothic. The name "Cros," for example, was dialect for "hole," and Rachilde's description reveals how aptly the name fits:

  Le Cros was a damp estate around which grew too many periwinkles, too much ivy, too much Virginia creeper, too many weeping willows and too many truffles. In front of the house was a pond full of frogs; at the back there were farms filled with not very legitimate but very dirty babies. In the garden the damp prevented the strawberries from ripening, the radishes

  were eaten by some beast we could never see, and if the cows ever wandered into this garden, their milk dried up. The cherry jam was blue—moldy a fortnight after it was made; on the other hand, wild oats were everywhere, tossing their heads with the insolence of a queen's aigrette. 4

  This monstrous and fantastic experience of nature is explicitly recalled in the preface to the autobiographical novel A Mort, "To the Death," but it is also evident throughout Rachilde's work, in her extravagant descriptive style, as well as her dramatic awareness of the dark and hidden powers of nature. With this vision as background, family lore also placed more active and tangible forces on the stage of Rachilde's imagination. Popular local legend maintained that the family turned into werewolves once a year because one of the ancestors had left the priesthood. Rachilde's arrival in the world on a night when the wind raged and owls screeched only added to these rumors, giving her an early and personal connection with the sinister forces that would figure so prominently in her writing.'*

  Rachilde's father, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, became a career army officer, and her mother, a talented musician, was the daughter of a successful newspaper editor. She remained their only child, a fact which was to have the greatest significance on her development. Her father had desperately wanted a son, and thus her early years, and arguably her entire life, became an unending attempt to compensate her father for this disappointment and gain his approval. Rachilde began learning to ride when she was four, and later participated in hunts, even though she sympathized more with the hunted than with the hunters, all in an effort to please.

  Her need to gain her fathers approval was evidently an ambivalent one, however, for at the same time that she courted

  his benevolence on horseback, she turned to a hobby sure to draw his disapproval: writing. At first, the activity was a clandestine one, conducted by moonlight. Later, her stories were published anonymously in local newspapers. Although writing and journalism were Rachilde's legacies from her maternal grandparents, such an activity could only irritate her father, who referred to writers as "plumitifs," making the predilection for the pen rather than the sword sound like some kind of ailment. At first, he remained ignorant of his daughter's defiance, and would sometimes read her stories aloud, censoring the parts he found too daring, unaware that the author was seated next to him. Later, he would take pride in the young reporter riding at his side and preparing accounts of military manoeuvres, but his pride stemmed in no small part from the fact that she was mistaken for a boy by the commanding general. 6

  At fourteen, Rachilde was engaged by her parents to an officer of her father's acquaintance. But the prospective match filled her with such antipathy that she revolted against her parents' will and threw herself in the frog-infested pond. Whether this action was a serious attempt at suicide, or whether the gesture was meant to convey, melodramatically, her strong resistance remains unclear, but the action made her parents realize that their daughter was now strong-willed and independent enough that she had outgrown their control. The engagement was broken off, and Rachilde turned once again to writing, this time more openly and committedly, as a means of self-expression. She was encouraged by a letter she received from the legendary Victor Hugo, 7 and set her sights on Paris. Such a goal was not irrational: for a writer to succeed, he or she could not remain in the provinces. At the same time, however, this career was one of the few available choices that would justify moving so far away from home. Rachilde's willful and independent spirit, formed by childhood experience, nurtured

  Introduction

  xv

  by an unstructured, private education, and fotced into premature responsibility by net mothet's increasing mental instability, could only flourish at a distance from her immediate family.

  At first, her visits to Paris were temporary and chaperoned (her mother, independently wealthy, maintained an apartment there). Thanks to the connections of a cousin, she was able to place her stories in Paris magazines and made several useful acquaintances and connections, among them writers and other society figures such as the actress Sarah Bernhardt. When she turned twenty-one, Rachilde moved definitively to Paris (by now with her father's blessing), and set up her own apartment in the Rue des Ecoles. During this period, she assumed the pseudonym she came to be known by for the rest of her life. When she had first used the name, she claimed it was that of a Swedish gentleman who had contacted her through a seance, but she later admitted that this fabrication had been for her credulous parents' benefit; it was, in fact, a name of her own invention.

  Wishing to remain independent of her parents, Rachilde supported herself by her writing, gruelling work since it involved not only producing the stories, but taking them round from publisher to publisher in order to place them and collect the small sum they could bring. The latent hostilities with her mother emerged more clearly at this time, as the unstable Madame Eymery attempted to undercut her daughter's career. Word reached Rachilde of a rumor that she was not the author of the works she was selling, a serious charge since no editor wanted to get involved in cases of possible plagiarism. Finally she asked a sympathetic editor for a description of the person spreading the rumors. She recognized the verbal portrait as her own mother. Whether out of malice, or because of her increasing madness, Madame Eymery appeared to believe the story about the Swedish gentleman, and thus informed all

  who would li
sten that the stories were not really her daughter's own work.

  In her memoirs, Rachilde dismisses this anecdote philosophically, with an indulgence and forbearance bred of time. 8 While she acknowledged maternal disappointment, 9 she never discusses her anger at her mother. There is ample evidence from her fiction, however, that her rage went deep. There are few maternal figures, and those that exist are weak and selfish, unable or unwilling to parent their offspring adequately. In The Juggler, for example, there are no mothers, and maternal relationships exist instead in surrogate relationships: between aunt and niece (a favored configuration in Rachilde s work) and between mistress and servant.

  Rachilde's struggle to escape entirely from the family triangle succeeded with Monsieur Venus. After this success, her future as a writer was assured. She continued to produce approximately one book a year for the next sixty years (her last publication was in 1947). Although she would never again have the kind of succes de scandale afforded by Monsieur Venus, she steadily accumulated an impressive list of novels, many of which received wide acclaim, including La Marquise de Sade (Monnier, 1887); Madame Adonis (Monnier, 1888), a companion piece to Monsieur Venus; a collection of stories entitled Le Demon de labsurde, "The Demon of the Absurd" (Mercure de France, 1894); and La Tour d'amour, "The Tower of Love" (Mercure de France, 1899), a horror story of madness and perversion set in a Breton lighthouse.

  Rachilde continued to write and publish with almost obsessional regularity, and enjoyed continued success in the pre-World War I years (for example with the historical novel, Le Meneur de louves, "The Wolftamer," in 1905), but the rise of the surrealist star gradually eclipsed her popularity, and her later work failed to earn her the wide support of a new generation of readers. Thus, The Juggler (La Jongleuse), first published

  by the Mercure de France in 1900 (the year of Nietzsche's death), represents the culmination of the fertile and prolific period of Rachilde's career spanning the years from 1884 until 1900. The novel stands out as the consummation of the themes that preoccupied her in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as well as an expression of a remarkable social philosophy far ahead of its time (Eliante, the heroine of The Juggler, even refers to it as a "religion," in chapter 4). Witty, dramatic and profound, The Juggler is at once one of Rachilde's most carefully constructed novels, a simultaneous expression and parody of Decadence, and a meditation on female power, desire, and sexuality.

  In this respect, The Juggler continues the established and important genre in French literature of works that analyze sexual politics. It can be compared, for example, to novels such as Dangerous Liaisons in its exploration through an epistolary exchange of the meaning of love and passion, as well as other libertine themes. 1() The relationship between the principal characters Eliante and Leon is a dangerous liaison, indeed, for both parties, and Eliantes debt to the figure of a Marquis is not only the literal debt of daughter to parent, but the literary debt to a precursor. Eliante in turn becomes a precursor to others. With her hair worn in the style of a helmet, she is a guerillere avant la lettre, and a champion of women's independence. She expresses common themes of women's experience, such as the requirement that they hide their intelligence (chapter 3), the difficulty of maintaining platonic friendships and the fear that when women do act on sexual attractions, they lose men's respect (chapter 1).

  The innovations of The Juggler are not only thematic, however, but also formal. The symbolist movement with which Rachilde was associated challenged the dominance of realism and naturalism in the novel and thus set the stage (to use one of The Juggler's most pervasive metaphors) for twentieth-

  century experimentation. The Juggler, therefore, stands like the figure of Janus on the highway of prose development: on the one hand the novel turns in recognition to the past, but on the other it also looks boldly to the future.

  At the turn of the century, when The Juggler was written and published, Rachilde's reputation was at its zenith. In 1889, she had married Alfred Vallette, and one year after, the celebrated review Mercure de France was born, along with their daughter. Rachilde's role in the appearance of the latter has never been questioned, but her role in the former has been underplayed or even entirely overlooked. Her name and reputation were extremely important factors in attracting contributors and readers, and thus in underwriting the success of the review. To her contemporaries, her role was evident, if not explicit. As well as acting as regular contributor and reviewer, she was the famous hostess of a Tuesday salon at the office of the Mercure de France that attracted the foremost literary figures of the Symbolist movement, along with international celebrities and up-and-coming writers.

  One such guest was the young Colette, whose first in the famous series of "Claudine" novels, Claudine a I'ecole, "Clau-dine at School," was published in the same year as The Juggler. Rachilde's close friendship with Colette's ex-husband Willy has clouded and obscured the nature of her relations with Colette, thought to be somewhat strained by rivalry and veiled hostility. More recently, however, it has been suggested not only that Rachilde was among the first to credit Colette, not Willy, as the true author of the Claudine stories, but also that she supported Colette both emotionally and financially. ! l

  Rachilde is certainly known to have been generous and supportive to another of her friends, also a regular guest at her salon, the young writer Alfred Jarry. The Vallettes supported Jarry throughout his brief life (he died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four), and in addition to material support, Rachilde in

  particular also offered less tangible gifts: she was one of Jarry s closest friends during his lifetime, and was instrumental in arranging for his play Ubu Rot to be performed at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in 1896, a performance which placed Jarry among the founders of modern drama. After his death, Rachilde contributed many anecdotes to the Jarry mythology. She wrote only one book of non-fiction devoted to a single author: her memoirs of the literary "superman" entitled Alfred Jarry; ou, Le surmale de lettres (Grasset, 1928).

  The extent to which Jarry and Rachilde influenced each other has never been fully studied, discussion having focused rather on the question of whether or not they were lovers, but The Juggler suggests some important points of comparison. Rachilde displays the same enjoyment of word play, in the form of puns and deformities, that characterizes Jarry s work, and shares his love of absurdity. She also shared his keen dramatic sense, and had had several plays performed before she came to write The Juggler. It is no coincidence that the heroine of this novel, Eliante, should be named after a character from Moliere's The Misanthrope. The same elements that brought success in her plays—her memorable characters and a sense of timing—are apparent in her fictional works. Yet theatricality is more than a theme, it is an essential element of The Juggler. Not only is the novel permeated with the vocabulary of the theatre, but with the brief exceptions of the opening scene and the excursion to Leon's apartment, all the action is set in the heroine Eliante's house, with its two wings: the public world of receptions and parties approached via the courtyard, and the intimate world of Eliante's rooms approached via the garden. Not only do the two wings of the house correspond to the wings of the theatre, they even carry the nineteenth-century names for those two sides: "cote cour" (courtyard side) and "cote jardin (garden side)." 12

  Thanks to this theatrical model, The Juggler is one of

  Rachilde's most carefully constructed novels. As a rule, she wrote rapidly and impetuously, 13 revising little, and many of her novels suffer as a consequence. Indeed, the first version of The Juggler, in 1900, is decidedly inferior to the later, revised edition represented here. When rewriting, Rachilde eliminated one entire chapter (chapter 11 in the original work, which appeared between chapters 10 and 11 of this edition) in which Eliante and Leon attend a performance of Othello. Formally, this cut simplifies the structure of the novel, preserving the unity of place (with the exceptions noted above). The excision further preserves the surprise of the ending by removing hints and suggest
ions that point too obviously to the conclusion. In other chapters, almost nothing has been added, and only an occasional word changed, but much has been omitted, and for the better. The rewriting removed repetitions and qualifications that either became redundant or else reduced Rachilde's delightfully suggestive ambiguity by answering the text's own rhetorical questions. The revisions leave the characteristic understatements intact, and allow a more active role for the reader, as was Rachilde's intention. Thus, The Juggler gained a remarkably coherent structure that gives shape to the sometimes effusive prose. Based on a complex yet regular pattern, the chapters alternate correspondence with dramatic personal confrontations. These interactions further alternate in their setting between the intimate scenes when characters enter via the garden, and social acts with entrance via the courtyard. All Leon's visits are clearly identified as occurring via one or the other of these entrances, which announce the tenor of the subsequent action.

  In this domestic theatre, Eliante is the star performer: she juggles, she dances, and Leon continually accuses her of being an actress. The curtain falls at the end of each dramatic encounter (as Leon explicitly notes in chapter 1), and the plot confirms the hypothesis offered by Leon in chapter 3 with re-

  gard to the play they ate about to see (a mise en abyme of the novel itself): a comedy that will become a drama toward the end (chapter 3).

  The effect is not only to animate the plot and display Rachilde's considerable dramatic talent, but also to make the reader complicit as spectator, cast in the same role as Leon, constantly compelled to watch. Rachilde's theatre of passions evokes the drama of a courtroom where the audience-jury is called upon to pass judgement, or the spectacle of an amphitheatre in which hysterics performed like vaudeville acts for the edification of medical students. For every witch, there must be an inquisitor, for every hysteric, a doctor, as Catherine Clement notes in her study of witches and hysterics, "The Guilty One." 14 Those who fall outside the symbolic order— "neurotics, ecstatics, outsiders, carnies, drifters, jugglers and acrobats" in Clement's text (p.7), or pathological cases, buffoons and histrions according to Eliante (chapter 8)—are dangerously mobile unless locked into their symbolic position on the margins by the participation of the spectator. While Clement describes the Italian dance ritual of the tarantella, Eliante, in the final chapter of The Juggler, dances a no less symbolic and equally cathartic cure for symbolic illness in a flamenco which hypnotizes the spectator (Leon) and lures him into the web of the black widow (Eliante) for the last act. How appropriate that Eliante's blend of sorcery and hysteria in The Juggler should be situated in 1897, the year, as Clement notes (p. 12), in which Freud recognized the similarities between the behavior of witches and the hysterics he was treating.