Rachilde may have been thinking of the myth in Plato’s Symposium,

“if it isn’t Eros himself.

They would both laugh, but they were more and more united in a common thought: the destruction of their sex.

The more he forgot his sex, the more she created around him multiple opportunities to feminize himself, and, so as not to frighten too much the male inside him that she wanted to smother, she treated each degrading idea at first as a joke, content to make him accept it seriously only later.

arrived, Raittolbe soon felt an immense compassion for this cross-dressed w[hore].

“Has anyone ever asked her for the grace to change their sex?” wondered the young woman, kissing the pious old woman with a sigh.

“He exists, my friend, and he is not even a hermaphrodite, not even impotent, he is a beautiful twenty-one-year-old male, whose instinctively feminine soul has mistaken its envelope.”

“I’m a man in love with a man, not with a woman!” she retorted, while her darkened eyes turned away from the shining eyes of the Antinous. “I’ve never been loved enough to want to reproduce a being in the image of a husband . . . and I’ve never been given enough orgasms for my brain not to have had the leisure to look for better . . .

because I know that you’re a man in love,