The Juggler

by Rachilde, Gustav Alaux (Illustrator), Melanie C. Hawthorne (Translator)

The Juggler (La Jongleuse) is a "decadent" novel that was first published in 1900. Its author, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), who used the pseudonym Rachilde, was a prolific novelist (over sixty works of fiction), playwright, literary critic and reviewer, and a forceful presence in French literary society of her time. The protagonist of the novel, Eliante Donalger, is in some sense an exaggerated double for her creator--bizarre in appearance, clothing, and interests. Instinctively grasping a medical and psychological truth that the turn-of-the-century scientific world was only beginning to understand, Eliante maintains that there is nothing "natural" about human sexual expression. She claims to be in love with an inanimate (though anthropomorphic and sexually ambiguous) object, a Greek amphora, and the novel traces the rivalry between this faithful partner and an ardent human suitor, a young medical student. It is only through juggling, both literally and metaphorically, that Eliante is able to use her seductive power to maintain desire. The surprise ending challenges the limits of such power in a controversial and surprising twist. Although Rachilde's work has been neglected in the past, the women's movement and feminist criticism have stimulated renewed interest in her fiction. The Juggler is a major rediscovery.

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, Literature, Classics, Theatre

215 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1900

About the author

Rachilde was the nom de plume of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, a French author who was born February 11, 1860 in Périgueux, Périgord, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France during the Second French Empire and died in April 4, 1953.
She is considered to be a pioneer of anti-realistic drama and a participant in the Decadent movement.
Rachilde was married to Alfred Vallette.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rachilde is the corporeal essence of a tempest. In the Juggler, she creates an enormously complex creature above gender, above sexuality, above allure, & yet, reflecting as accurately as one ever could, the epitome of these qualities, which could quite possibly inflect autobiographical tones. Rachilde presents her stance on the fickleness of man the instant he obtains the effervescent form of pleasure stemming from sexual intercourse. It is as if the beginning & the end occupy one realm when penetration & consummation meet, climax, & precipitate the death of the interaction. Leon Reille, her male character, is a beast behind closed quarters guised as a gentlemen. He would rape & ravage. He would succumb to animalistic instincts. He is as a jealous god which would have no deviating worship. He is brutal & unremittable. He is rapacious. Eliante, the female protagonist, is stoic, reserved, seductive, plagued, intellectual, & mysterious. She controls her demeanor with a solemn stew, he fidgets with a feverish anguish, she’s engaged with her sexuality to the point that it is an utterly honed craft, whereas he is a child given a complicated toy with which he knows not how to operate. He thrashes about with it as an enthusiastic novice may. Eliante is a master seductress because she is so aloof while tugging upon the thread of passion so vehemently. She has the instincts of a spider. She approaches with a great fervor then retreats with the same ferverish pitch. The psychology of her femininity is a web even unto herself. It as if she weaves with intent to sabotage her own systematic weaving, thus the entirety of the exercise is under her complete acrobatic control. The perplexity of the talents of a juggler. Enthralling to the eye. The element of suspense. The dexterity of keeping elements, juxtaposed, aloft. The act is captivating. Mesmerizing. Eliante is, above everything else, a performer. A performer whom, at times, so talented in deception, seduction, & disguise, often loses sight & control of her roles. Almost Hamletesque, she leaves the reader baffled as to whether the madness is a charade or sincere, & it is so perplexing & so layered, that the character herself becomes this chimeric bystander wandering in the labyrinth of her of own psyche. Leon is a toad, a fool, an adolescent miscreant. He is a fucking tool! This is from the view of a mere man whose brain is developed quite differently from the female sex. Obvious discrepancies in gender roles come into play & yet they are nimbly constructed with the hint of hermaphroditic nuances. The Janus composed simultaneously of two faces. Eliante often shimmers in emotional nudity while wearing the most elegant of clothing. Her experience arouses him while she pities his superfluous façade of nobility. Leon dawns the shroud of fear & yet this fear is draped in adrenaline, as the hunter which aims for a daunting & predatory game. It is not enough to kill the game hare but to slay the lioness &, perhaps in the process, his innocence. It is she the lioness that smells blood & only seems to want to toy with the prey, kill it for killing sake, not for devouring or savoring its flavor. Rachilde seems as modern feminists, perhaps I should rephrase since there has been many reformations of the movement. She seems to downgrade the docile or the perception of the submissive woman. Missie, her niece, is quite the character through description alone. A child amongst a goddess. Rachilde is hypocritical in castigating the way women are subjugated. She proposes obscene things in the subjugation of her niece. She would practically sell her into slavery, if not physical, mental at least. Her manipulations are fanciful. As the tale develops & unfolds, Rachilde juggles the complexity of the characters, friction against the tradition of gender roles, contradictions of romance. I believe Eliante is a failed juggler, a failed entertainer, yet not a failure in the rediscovered IDEA of love, not the ENACTMENT of love. She maneuvers her sensuality in an evasive shifting of weight. She calls upon her suitors while fleeing. She flees their grasp while pursuing them. She is of a curious & cryptic sex. And just when you find Rachilde staves off the pleasures of the flesh with these spectral boundaries, she leaps beyond grips of flesh into godliness. O what a beautiful figure to behold, drenched in the libations of tragedy, flowing freely as the blood of Pentheus spilled by the highest priestess.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her early 20s in the 1880s, Rachilde was struggling to support herself free of parental oversight (ever since a half-hearted drowning attempt in the family reflecting pool freed her from an arranged marriage at age 14) by placing stories with various literary publications in Paris and beyond. This became more difficult when someone spread rumors that she was plagiarizing her works from a deceased Swedish nobleman reached via seance. This turned out to be an attempt by her own mother to sabotage her career, through some combination of resentment, insanity, and, possibly, actual belief in a tall tale Rachilde told her family to explain her nom de plume. In 1884, age 24, however, she buried these troubles and ensured a lasting readership with her first novel Monsieur Venus, the tale of a strong-willed noble-women's gradual feminizing of her kept man, which also got her banned in Belgium on charges of "inventing entirely new vices". And so she published 59 more works of fiction spanning the decadent era and then halfway into the 20th century.

Upon the turn of the century, she published The Juggler, another tale of deviantly determined erotism driven by a powerful female lead. Eliante, a young widow of peculiar tastes and personality, is courted by younger medical student Leon. Juggling his expectations to maintain a kind of heightened anticipation of love and desire, she reveals her true lover: an androgynous amphora obtained abroad. As a kind of strange and constantly shifting love story, this unfolds in a formalist alternation of meetings and epistolary chapters, leading up to an excellently placed one-line chapter, and suitably odd culmination. There's a kind of claustrophobia in spending so much of the novel monitoring this one relationship (amid a few other key supporting characters, particularly Eliante's niece, who also has an eye on Leon, but the characters are unusual enough (probably even more so in their time) as to prevent this from being especially predictable. And of course Rachilde also juggles all the sensory and sensual details that her decadent milieu demands. An odd pleasure.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite possibly the only novel of 1900 in which a woman falls in love with a large amphora and brings herself to orgasm atop it, as her male admirer watches, spellbound - after he asks her if she's a negress and she assures him she's not. (She is Creole.) He is 22, she's 35 and widowed, though at one point he fears she might actually be 40, and, Trumplike, demands to see her birth certificate.

They have a magnetic attraction to each other (he wants to rape her in an early scene and is stopped only by the fact that he's wearing a suit), but she keeps trying to affiance him to her niece. Ultimately, only her suicide by knife (she juggles, as a hobby, with knives) convinces him to marry the niece.

As part of my project of noticing when the term nigger appears in 19th and 20th century works, it appears here. The protagonist Eliante had an "old negro servant" named Ninaude, from Martinique, whom Eliante's husband would sometimes beat mercilessly with a cane. Ninaude would sing to Eliante:

"Me, little nigger
Love this Missy
Dream 'bout her lips
want her .... [here Rachilde uses an ellipsis to suggest a rhyming word, probably hips]

Dance for her/
Like a lost soul, alas
Think she's beautiful
Show my .... [the ellipsis here replaces "ass"]

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leon Reille, fashionable young-man-about-town (with a rather sour view of love and male/female relations) finds himself somewhat obsessed with a strange, slightly-older beauty, Madame Eliante Donalger, who attends the same functions as he but seems extremely unapproachable in her tight black dresses and perfectly assembled/aesthetically calculated outfits. Still, one night, driven by his desire for conquest, he forces his way into sharing Donalger's cab, where she impulsively invites him to her home (she lives with a brother-in-law and a niece), where they dine and he attempts to flirt with her, towards his ultimate goal, but she soon reveals that she is far more sophisticated and aesthetically superior to him, showing him a tall, vaguely human-shaped & sized, delicate alabaster amphora (a vase) that she passionately proclaims to love far more than any clumsy, brutish, human coupling.

Eventually, we are introduced to Eliante's niece Missie ("a young girl of twenty trying to pass for ten"): a loud, ramshackle girl, all pointy knees and elbows, clumsy, loud, contradictory and yet not uncharming in her odd, modern way; and her brother-in-law (old, deaf, blustering) and learns her background as a French Creole, raised in a convent ("I don't know, I don't know anything. ... I don't want to know anything"), married young (she 17, he 40) to a naval man who left her rich upon her death after some travel in the torrid tropics. And the odd, flirtatious mating dance between Leon and Eliante continues - he sarcastic, brutish, direct or sly, she willing to concede little advances but always playful in her responses ("What a woman! I'm going to hate you!" "That's because we don't yet speak the same language? That will come!"). Eliante seems to be maneuvering Leon into marrying Missie, not out of ulterior motives, but simply because it makes the most sense for all three (allowing her to stay near Leon, whom she claims to love but is incapable of "loving" until he "understands her").

There's that charming, heady and intoxicating contrast of certain Decadent interests I've been missing in my recent reading - flirtatious dialogue contrasted with detailed descriptions of rich, ornate objects, items, rooms, clothes, vegetation and food (Dessert is a mixture of bitter and sweetly flavored powders and creams tinctured with tea concentrate and is eaten in considered "Chinese" custom - as Eliante drinks from a curious, crescent shaped glass so delicate and oddly designed the overheated Reille ends up smashing it against his own teeth as he finds himself incapable of handling its aesthetic construction with the attention it deserves. Which could be a metaphor (this early, it's hard to tell). The initial, opening cab-ride and meal, btw, is a masterpiece of dueling dialogue, attacks and ripostes, with the increasingly frustrated Reille, sure he is going to dazzle his obsessed-over conquest with brazen chatter:

"'I'm not in love with you ... in case I look it! I'm not going to fall for any woman. No, never. You look like a curious object to me, and I find it amusing to look at you close up ... in the shop window. Don't want to touch . . . nor to buy, I assure you.'

A short silence fell like hail. The woman coughed lightly.

'Buy?' she sighed. 'Poor child!'

He shuddered. She had said this in an emotional voice, deliciously maternal. The insult hardly touched her. She was feeling sorry for the very person who was trying out, on her, his brand new male cruelty."

...only to find himself outmatched at every turn in a fascinating verbal dance in which Eliante's strange aesthetic tastes are balanced against his merely carnal:

"He was trying to joke, but he was beginning to want to bite her.

Her resistance was too absurd. What did she want from him?

'Give me your arm, and let's go into the salon,' she said, starting to smile.

He obeyed mechanically because he was wearing a suit; if he had been in an ordinary jacket, he would undoubtedly have raped her."

And if you find that shocking, just wait until she demonstrates her passion for the alabaster vase!

Now, that all sounds great but the truth is that I found the middle of this book a bit confusing and slightly frustrating. Mostly because one has to deal with the rather obscure and abstruse dating/relationship conventions of the turn-of-the-19th-century, which the book assumes you know, contrasted against Madame Donalger's personal philosophy of love and passion, which you don't know.

And while some details don't pan out in the plot (that human-shaped vase, for one), the ending is really striking and dark, as Donalger finally "dances" for Leon...

As might be expected, from previous Rachilde, there's other good bits. Donalger's "native maid" of days gone past is presented in the racist assumptions of the time, but there's a great but where she collaborates with her Mistress to write the latter's first love letter. And, as I said, the ending really does stick the landing. Not the first Rachilde I'd suggest reading, but worth a check-in if you like what you read elsewhere.

[Katie]

Girl falls in love with vase, girl juggles knives.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This woman let her dress trail behind her like a queen trailing her life.”

In my week-long creative writing workshop titled “Quantum Poetics and New Narratives: Writing the Speed of Light” last year in the Naropa Summer Writing Program, a woman was enrolled who was a juggler in a traveling circus group. After introducing Einstein’s theory of general relativity, I asked each student to experiment with the spacetime of the page by writing a poem that might exist in a rocket traveling at the speed of light where space gets compressed, mass increases, and time slows. We also discussed a question posed by Shanxing Wang in his book, Mad Science in Imperial City: “Is there a 4th person narration?” We explored the idea of 4th person point of view in relation to higher dimensions, specifically the 4th and 5th dimensions of spacetime proposed by theoretical mathematics and physics.

At the end of the week, in a coordinated performance in front of the community, the students delivered their rocketship poems and 4th person/higher-D narratives. The Juggler was the last to perform. In a moving feat of other-worldly timing and talent, she juggled five crystal balls while simultaneously reciting her higher-D poem with each phrase meticulously synched to the sparkling electrons revolving smoothly above her head. Similarly

the protagonist and her suitor in Rachilde’s The Juggler juggle between them, through decadent conversation and letters, a higher-D language for “love” that is at once relentless in its appetite and wholly macabre in its swallowing:

ELIANTE:

“I want,” she said in a very soft voice whose softness contrasted with the violence of her words, “I want you to know what I know, for you to go as far as me, I demand I have the right to demand that you choose me as I choose you. You must learn about me before you earn me! and if you are already tired, you must allow me to want it in your place!”

LEON:

“I love you! You’re right. You’re right slowly, little by little, the way a bird builds its nest…”

“…the only one I want is you, not for one night, but for the only night of unique love, the one that covers the whole earth with one beat of its black wing.”

In addition to such orbiting crystal balls is Rachilde’s commentary on sexual politics and power delivered in iridescent detail:

LEON:

“I dreamed, last night, that you were like a column of smoke. You started at the center of the globe and touched the clouds. I could see the whole world in its spherical form. You, you kept your face above the column, a waxen face illuminated by pupils of precious stones, and you swayed from left to right, right to left, in an absolutely intolerable rhythmical motion. And I struggled to reach you the way one struggles, alas! in dreams, remaining immobile. The column you were, always swaying, ended up turning, the folds of long veils, those of black dresses, blended into even blacker thicker smoke, the night of the whole world turned with you in whirlwind gyrations, and it sucked in the clouds, diluted the earth. I was thinking: ‘If I fired a revolver into the base of that column, just a powder shot, from a child’s pistol, she would collapse because it’s well known in sea voyages that a canon shot fired at the base of a whirlwind makes it dissolve into a salutary little rain.’ Only I didn’t have to hand any revolver or child’s pistol suitable for reducing feminine importance. I had to suffer to the point of nausea, to the point of vomiting up my soul and is superfluity, to see you playing this trick of the column….My god, madam, how I suffered unnecessarily! and now, tired of running, your waxen face looked more human, your eyes had charming looks of pity, but you were very distant, for you seemed to diminish in a huge regression. And in an instant you were a woman, of normal height, as big as a doll. However, you seemed to leave me, to leave the world, for your little feet were distinctly placed on the declivity of the globe. I held out my arms, calling. Your face, a distant little face of agony, was transparently pale, all illuminated by two stars…then, the stars went out, the face was dead, eyelids closed and mouth twisted, your feet left the declivity of the globe, and you disappeared …completely. There remained the thick night, smoky, a globe that looked like the vulgar globe of a lamp of black crystal. And the stars, through space, to me looked like appliqué on tulle. Something even more false than your smoky dresses.”

Whether the “love” between Eliante and Leon is false or authentic is of less concern than the novel’s preoccupation with the role that artifice plays in the relationship between the real and unreal. In a delightfully strange illustration of this theme, Eliante, early on in the story, brings Leon to her salon where “there was one admirable objet d’art placed in the middle of the room on a pedestal of old rose velvet, like an altar; an alabaster vase the height of a man, so slim, so slender, so deliciously troubling with its ephebe’s hips, with such human appearance…”

“Isn’t it beautiful! Isn’t he beautiful,” continued Eliante feverishly. “Oh, he is unique. It’s impossible to think of anything more charming. You would think, when the light penetrates it obliquely, that it’s inhabited by a soul, that a heart burns in this alabaster urn! You were telling me about pleasure? This is another thing entirely! This is the power of love in an unknown material, the madness of silent delight. He will never say anything. He is very old, centuries old, he has stayed young because he has never cried his secret to anyone.”

Eliante goes on to explain to Leon that she loves this vase, that she amuses herself by dressing him up, kissing him, imagining he’s happy.

“No! No! You don’t understand me at all…but I like you enough to explain. I am truly in love with everything that is beautiful, good, that seems absolute, the very definition of pleasure. But pleasure is not the goal; it’s a way of being. Me, I’m always…happy. I wanted to bring you here to show you I don’t need a human caress to reach orgasm….”

And with that, gripping the alabaster vase, she has one.

Leon is “dazzled, delighted, indignant.” “It’s scandalous! Right there…in front of me…without me? No, it’s horrible!”

“Ah! A man who doesn’t know how to watch love is so silly. You really need a lesson. Now, run along quickly…”

As is evidenced in this scene, like her friend and perhaps lover Alfred Jarry, Rachilde rejects strict realism in favor of symbolist and absurdist approaches to narrative. Consequently, Rachilde’s writing is often dramatic and distorted, though not nearly as dramatic or distorted as Jarry’s, which is spectacularly more grand in formal experimentation at both the molecular scale of the sentence and the astronomical scale of concept. However, like Jarry, Rachilde seems to intuit the relationship of gravity to matter and antimatter on the page like The Juggler “keeping time” by manipulating the “objet d’art”—the word, the crystal ball—through space, which, we know from physics is not empty but populated with forces such as gravity that warp spacetime and can move, unlike humans, into the invisible spaces between universes within the multiverse. As contemporary physicists working on string theory attempt to develop a theory of quantum gravity, which operates at the subatomic level, The Juggler creates gravity by performing it.

[Krikri Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow un roman vraiment top qui arrive à bouleverser la domination masculine d'une façon complètement originale. Parfois les motivations de Missie/Eliante sont un peu mélangées, mais Eliante est un personnage vraiment intéressant. Léon c'est un petit merde, mais bon quoi de neuf quant aux mecs blancs dans la littérature du début XXeme

[Parlei · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd novel, with odd dialogue, an odd plot and odd characters. It really wasn't my kind of novel, and perhaps it's because I'm not into theatre, but I also found it offensive on many levels (to notions of race, womanhood, and romance.) There's tactics of subversion used to undo establishments of power and oppression, and there's subversion for the sake of subversion--I think this novel encapsulates the latter.

To Rachilde's credit, I did enjoy the metaphor of "juggling" (juggling identity, gender, power, age, social status, performance) and how she adeptly played with this theme throughout the novel. I also liked the way she manipulated notions of 'master' and 'slave' between Eliante and Léon, the two main characters whose burning so-called "love" is the centerpiece of this comedy-drama.

I did not, however, find the manipulation of power on Eliante's behalf satisfying. It was really offensive, seemingly only revenge on the male race for her own pleasures of mistreatment and juggling. I constantly wondered about her motivations for wanting a man like Léon, who repeatedly makes references to his desire to rape, in her and her family's life. There are also very offensive depictions of creoleness and blackness, and you can note that whenever there is something mysterious, dangerous, or distasteful, there is also reference to it being "black" in a sense of the word beyond color.

The book is a bit easier to swallow if you read Melanie C. Hawthorne's introduction (English version only). She helpfully explains some of the vaguer/old French society references and notes about Rachilde herself.

Ultimately, however, I would not want to read a novel like this in French class, would not teach this novel myself, and would not recommend it to my students.

[Yasmine Iliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for a class but I am now absolutely enamored with it. This is definitely in part because of my theatre background. Rachilde has an excellent understanding of theatre (no one is surprised,) and this is one of my favorite novels that I have read over the course of quarantine.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange novel written in 1900 by this decadence female author.

Affluent, vamp Eliante Donagler (35) widow of a naval officer (nasally disfigured during the marriage) has a virginal, legible niece-in-law Missie (20). Leon Reille (22) meets her and her exotic urn after a party. He basically falls in love but, Eliante literally and metaphorically dancing and jugging with his emotions engineers her and others' relationships.

The opening chapter is a remarkably good and decadently rich representation of Eliante and her comparable, sexual persona in the vase. The middle of the novel wains to standard seductress interactions in my view (and an important subtle distinction if Eliante is 35 or 40 which I couldn't quite grasp why) before a finale in a darkened room with Reille, when he is at his aroused weakest, concludes a good read.

I'll definitely look for more on this author but believe there may only be 2 or 3 of her bibliography many in translation.

[Réminiscence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grande bacchante Eliante jongle avec l’amour.
"Cette femme laissait traîner sa robe derrière elle comme on peut laisser traîner sa vie quand on est reine"
Sous sa parure noire la jongleuse pourrait presque s’évaporer, à la fois maîtresse mystique et amante inaccessible Eliante se joue de l’amour pour parvenir à ses fins.
Le jeune médecin Léon Reille, archétype désolant de la contenance masculine face aux femmes cherche à tout prix à conquérir la troublante Éliante.
Éliante fusionne avec sa passion de l’exotisme, de l’orientalisme pour entretenir sa liberté et perpétuer son errance, elle n’hésite pas à jongler avec des couteaux ou à mimer l’amour avec un amphore d’albâtre pour faire languir son jeune soupirant.
Rachilde tout comme dans "Mr Venus" cherche à dévoiler la dégénérescence des relations amoureuses parce que "quand on est l’Amour on peut vivre seule"
Encore une fois j’ai adoré retrouver la lucidité et l’originalité des romans de la mystique Rachilde !

[Kokelector · Rating 3 out of 5]

"LA BEBEDORA DE SANGRE Y OTROS CUENTOS"

Extraño libro. A la librería que soy asiduo me lo recomendaron, como la versión femenina del "Marqués de Sade", para descubrir en el epílogo que de juventud leyó al Marqués y que participo en los círculos literarios franceses vestida como hombre y con este seudónimo. En estos cuatro cuentos, la mujer como placer culposo está presente. El terror psicológico de la peste que asoló Europa también. Pero es una ficción que debe leerse en perspectiva de un autor revelación del siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX.

[Grant North · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book starts with its strongest foot forward, having the main heroine orgasm by stroking a human sized alabaster vase in front of a belligerent suitor half her age. You can’t really escalate from there.

[hing · Rating 4 out of 5]

idgi but u do u sis but also the racism 😳

[Afton · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

( 2.75 stars )

this book is just the most bizarre shit i’ve ever read. i can’t say that i liked it, but boy was it something.

[Kit Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

What the actual fuck did I just read. This was assigned reading for a class and I hated all of the characters.

[Naiya Patel-Kapka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confusing but amazing imagery of Eliante and her costumes

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who read it, you know why that one star is not there… but I had fun though!

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book unlike any I've read before....a masterpiece of HORN. The savagery of desire and lust. Toxic...ill...perverse. This story oozes drama and I'm living.

[boo · Rating 4 out of 5]

part of me wonders if all the convolutions and metaphor are to keep men from finishing.