Jacques is described elsewhere as a dazzling Titian blonde, well-fleshed in breast and hips, only his voice, hands, and coarse hair betraying his sex. Raoule herself is taller than he, a handsome brunette with level brows and a boyish figure. On the occasions when she ventures out in men’s clothes her own sex is never suspected. That the method of satisfaction employed between the two is the kiss, and that only in its usual manifestation, is made unequivocally clear. Late in the story Jacques discovers that impotence has resulted. Rachilde accounts with care for her heroine’s behavior pattern. Throughout Raoule’s childhood the aunt had harped upon the vileness of physical passion. At the same time the girl’s emotional endowment was such that the mere reading of an erotic book threw her into a violent fever. Hence, both the compulsive experimenting with many lovers and the frigidity which prevented satisfaction. Raoule herself lays the blame for the latter squarely upon her lovers, whom she has taken as she has read books, in order to learn what passion is. But men, she says, offer a woman either brutality or weakness, never the one aphrodisiac—Love—which might teach her real passion. And to become the slave of mere sensation is unthinkable. If one is merely to indulge one’s senses, then to preserve self-respect one must remain, like a man, indifferent to the experience and master of oneself. Barrès, in his preface, says that Rachilde was only twenty when she wrote the tale, a well-bred and innocent girl with nothing but wishful dreaming from which to spin her fantastic plot. He singles out pride as the chief handicap of both heroine and author, pride which cannot endure domination of any sort by a man. To what mysterious cult are they pledged, these men and women whom love of self draws one to another [of their own sex]?... One sees with alarm men losing their taste for women, as Monsieur Vénus displays hatred of male traits.... It is _la maladie du siècle_ ... it smells of death.[10] What he naturally dared not say more plainly is that the tale gives clear evidence of severely repressed homosexual inclinations on the author’s part.