maternal tone. Rachilde also befriended Léonide Leblanc and publicly supported the one-time courtesan's efforts to enter legitimate theater. She was an early friend and supporter of fellow writer Colette and American ex-patriate Natalie Clifford Barney. Rachilde remained socially active for much of her life, appearing around town with young men even into her sixties and seventies. There were naturally rumors of licentious adultery, but she had always preferred the company of gay men and men like Maurice Barrès, for whom there was pleasure in the torture of restraint. In 1935, however, when Rachilde was seventy-five years-old, her husband Alfred Vallette died at his desk. Her truly Bohemian phase had ended with her marriage to Vallette. Her active social presence ended with his death. After more than fifty years, her Tuesday salons came to an end. In her Parisian apartment adjoining the Mercure de France, on Saturday, 4 April 1953, Rachilde died at the age of ninety-three. Read more information on salon culture in France. Gender and sexuality Although Rachilde was married to a man, her experience was not typical of a woman of her day. She distrusted women and envied the privilege of men. She referred to women as the inferior brothers of men. Rachilde was known to dress in men's clothes, even though doing so was in direct violation of French law. Her reasons are not entirely clear, as there is both boldness and polite reserve in a request she filed for a permit to do so:Dear Sir, please authorize me to wear men's clothing. Please read the following attestation, I beg you and do not confuse my inquiry with other classless women who seek scandal under the above costume.She did refer to herself as androgynous, but her definition was functional and pragmatic. There was such a thing as a man of letters, not a woman of letters. Hence, she was both a woman and man. Nor was she shy about that, identifying herself on her cards as, "Rachilde, homme de lettres," a man of letters. Her views on gender were strongly influenced by her distrust of her mother and her envy of the privileged freedom she saw in men like her philandering father.I never trusted women since I was first deceived by the eternal feminine under the maternal mask and I don't trust myself anymore. I always regretted not being a man, not so much because I value