Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book logically must end in death: Aphrodite closes in a scene of death, with obsequies.
It is the end of Atala (Chateaubriand invisibly hovers over our whole literature), but gracefully refashioned and renewed with art and tenderness,—so well that the idea of death comes to join itself with the idea of beauty; the two images, entwined like two courtisans, slowly fades into the night.
[RACHILDE]
Sincerity, what an enormous unreasonable demand, if it is a question of woman! Those most praised for their candor were nevertheless comedians, like the weeping Marceline, an actress moreover who wept through her life, as in a role, with the consciousness which the plaudits of the public give. Since women have written, not one has had the good faith to speak and confess themselves in bold humility, and the only ideas of feminine psychology known to literature must be sought in the literature of men. There is more to learn of women in Lady Roxanna than in the complete works of George Sand. It is not perhaps a question of untruthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when they ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading—perhaps—over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even a higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men are often superior to the men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
This incapacity is not personal; it is generic and absolute. It is needful, then, to compare women exclusively with themselves, and not scorn them for whatever of egoism or personality is lacking: this fault, outside of literature and art, is generally estimated as equal to a positive virtue.
Whether they essay their charms in perversity or candor, women will better succeed in living than in playing their comedy; they are made for life, for the flesh, for materiality,—and they will joyfully realize their most romantic dreams if they do not find themselves arrested by the indifference of man whose more sensitive nerves suffer from vibrating in the void. There is an evident contradiction between art and life; we have hardly ever seen a man live in action and dream at the same time, transposing in writing the gestures that first were real: the equivalence of sensations is certain and the horrors of fear can better be described by whosoever imagines them than by the man that experiences them. On the contrary, the predominance in a temperament of tendencies to live, dulls the sharpness of the imaginative faculties. With the more intelligent women, those best gifted for cerebral pursuits, the impelling motivation will most easily be translated into acts than into art. It is a physiological fact, a state of nature it would be as absurd to reproach women with as to blame men for the smallness of their breasts or the shortness of their hair. Moreover, if it is a question of art, the discussion, which touches such a small number of creatures, has for humanity, like all purely intellectual questions, but an interest of the steeple or the street corner.
All this, then, being admitted, and it also being admitted that l'Animale is Rachilde's most singular book (although not the most ambiguous) and that le Démon de l'Absurde is the best, I will willingly add, not for the sole pleasure of contradicting myself and destroying the virtue of the preceding pages, that this collection of tales and imaginative dialogue proves to me a realized effort at true artistic sincerity. Pages like la Panthère or les Vendanges de Sodom show that a woman can have phases of virility, to write, careless of necessary coquetteries or customary attitudes, make art with nothing but an idea and from words, create.