By most accounts, she disliked motherhood and prioritized writing and supporting other writers over her daughter. In 1890, Vallette launched the avant-garde magazine Mercure de France, 'the most influential avant-garde journal of arts and literature of the era.':95 Rachilde served as the journal's literary critic, and as a 'creative advisor to her husband'.:95 There, she not only got to write her own material, but helped select and refine the work of others and to express her opinions in a way that would help define literature for fin de siècle France. Rachilde began to hold her Tuesday salon in the Mercure offices. She took great pride in the luminaries who attended, a group which included not only the established inner circle of symbolist writers, but other notable counter-cultural figures such as Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, painters Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, composer Maurice Ravel, and many others. Beyond poetry and prose, one stated goal of Mercure de France was to encourage the development of symbolist theater. Rachilde was especially involved in working with Paul Fort and his Théâtre d'Art. That theater would be home for her dramas La Voix du sang (1890) and Madame la Mort (1891). Continuing her desire to support symbolist theater, but also feeling inspired to encourage the production of plays by French authors, she became involved in supporting Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Her own drama The Crystal Spider (1894) would eventually be produced there, establishing a refined model for symbolist theater. Throughout her life, Rachilde's most infamous friendships were often tortured by the inability of her (generally male) friends to decide whether they admired her, lusted for her, or pitied her, as publicly exemplified by Maurice Barrès in his preface to a later edition of Monsieur Venus. Good friend Jean Lorrain referred to her and his other female friends as high-strung, sex-addicted pervert, to which she said that he and her other male friends were also neurotic, just in a more balanced way. Even so, she often went out of her way for them, as when using her connections to arrange hospital care for Paul Verlaine. It is less discussed, but Rachilde developed important relationships with women as well. Despite having poked fun at bas-bleu women in her preface to À Mort! (1886), she formed a complex relationship with writers Camille Delaville and Georges de Peyrebrune. These women were friends and supporters but also critics, often with a frank yet