“I am like a little child naked in a strong wind. I have a fever, I shiver, I’m too hot or too cold. My lips retain the unusual fruity taste of your mouth, & the bitter taste of your saliva lingers on my tongue, making me find everything I eat bland, sickening since nothing is as good as your love.”
— Rachilde
“My love”, she whispered, so low she sounded to Jacques as if she were speaking from the bottom of an abyss, “now we shall belong to each other in a strange country that you do not know. It is the country of madmen but not the country of brutes. I am taking away your vulgar senses and giving you others more refined.”
— Rachilde
“If I created a new depravity I would be a priestess, while my imitators would founder, after my reign, in abominable filth…Don’t you think that proud men, copying Satan, are more guilty than the Satan of the Bible, who invented pride? Is Satan not respectable because of his unprecedented and divinely inspired sin?”
— Rachilde
“Ah! A man who doesn’t know how to watch love is so silly. You really need a lesson.”
— Rachilde
“All monsters have their fits of depression.”
— Rachilde
“And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace…I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman…may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in ’93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big…fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor.”
— Rachilde
“A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt’s rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God’s bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!”That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and… Raoule was not a nun.”
— Rachilde
“A caprice is handled like a stew, and the pepper is added at the last minute.”
— Rachilde
“An error of the passions is not the flowering of a great love, and merely the beauty of the human form is not capable of inspiring an eternity of mad attachment.”
— Rachilde
“No, no, don’t let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.”
— Rachilde
“It is true, Monsieur,” Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, “that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one’s self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures.”
— Rachilde
“I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better…I have wanted the impossible…”
— Rachilde