Editing the Text of Popular Opinion: Literature as Publicity in Jean Lorrain's Maison pour dames

Abstract

Sickened by the snobbism and fatuity of the Tout-Paris savaged in his columns, the infamous Jean Lorrain in 1900 abandoned what he called "la ville empoisonnee" in order to take up residence in Nice, where he savored the pleasure of wandering through the city's old quarter with its redolence of cheeses, musk, and spice. Lorrain had tired of being harried by litigation and public censure, had grown impatient with being attacked in the anonymous letters flooding his apartment in Auteuil. And so the writer who, in 1885, had arrived in Paris, anxious like Rastignac to join in "la lutte du poete contre la capitale corrompue" (Jullian 47), finally found himself obliged, at age 45, to concede defeat and to go into exile in the South. Better known today as the ether-addicted homosexual who consorted with wrestlers and garcons bouchers, chronicler of les moeurs parisiennes, whose accounts of the demi-monde both titillated and scandalized his readers, Lorrain was also a prolific poet, conteur, and dramatist, a novelist whose fictions offered comment on the unhealthy notoriety that made the author a familiar but marginal figure. Generally neglected and forgotten since his death in 1906, consigned to a literary purgatory where his writings have languished for too long, Lorrain, ne Paul Duval, was at once a conspicuous public figure, famous for his friendship with Sarah Bernhardt and for his duel with Marcel Proust, and a journalist who skewered social pretenders and poseurs in his abrasive Pall-Malls. Indeed, Lorrain's cynical depictions of Paris as a modern-day Babylon have often obscured his literary works that deal with the same themes. Published posthumously in 1908, Lorrain's novel Maison pour dames has been characterized by one critic as "une satire f6roce des petits cenacles journalistico-litteraires" (Kyria 107). Yet apart from giving insights into the operation of a typical turn-of-the-century poetry review, with its cynical commercial maneuverings and exploitation of contributors, the novel also shows the author's identity becoming just another fiction sold to the public, a collaborative text whose meaning depends on its production as a publicity vehicle accorded a favorable reception by a distant and patronized readership.