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.

Jacques’s words show the degree to which he assumes a feminine identity.

“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 accept you as a lover, my dear. You won’t be the first, and I am a gentleman! . . .”

apple “signifies sexual knowledge,”

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

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

were the only clues on him as to his sex.

Raoule is no ordinary woman.