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

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

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

What did the low birth of this man matter for what she wanted to do with him? The envelope, the epidermis, the palpable being, the male sufficed for her dream.

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.

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

were the only clues on him as to his sex.

“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.”

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