Monsieur Vénus: roman matérialisteMonsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel R <scp>achilde</scp> : Monsieur Vénus: roman matérialiste. Edited by M <scp>elanie</scp> H <scp>awthorne</scp> and L <scp>iz</scp> C <scp>onstable</scp> . (MLA Texts & Translations). New York, Modern Language Association, 2004. xliii+212 pp. Pb $9.95.R <scp>achilde</scp> : Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel. Translated by M <scp>elanie</scp> H <scp>awthorne</scp> . (MLA Texts & Translations). New York, Modern Language Association, 2004. xlii+211 pp. Pb $9.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until now, the text of Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus to which we have had access is that of the first French edition, published in 1889 with its famous preface by Maurice Barrès. It was, however, the Brussels pornographer Brancart who originally published Monsieur Vénus in June 1884. No doubt anticipating the legal troubles which soon followed — Rachilde was fined and given a Belgian jail term (unserved) — she made certain cuts in a second Belgian printing and in the 1889 French version. Thanks to the present Hawthorne-Constable edition, we now may read, in reasonable, paperback format, Rachilde's original words. This new edition restores at least three important deletions, including an entire short chapter and an important reference to necrophilia on the very last page. Introduction, notes and critical apparatus (almost identical in the French and English versions) present cogently the biographical Rachilde and the modern feminist revival of interest in her works. Yet some will question the editors' claims for her place in literary history. Was she ever a ‘mediator of the aesthetic and intellectual ideas of her time’? Certainly, it is not clear either that her fiction was widely read or that her literary criticism was respected. Jules Bertaut (1909), among others, pictures her as ‘tout à fait en marge’, notorious not through good literature, but via scandal. The translation, a complete reworking of an out-of-print 1929 text by Madeleine Boyd, is very welcome, but the task was an ungrateful one given the uneven tone of the novel which shuttles between overwrought ardour and heavy-handed confrontation. The uneducated Jacques Silvert thus asks at one point, ‘And what matters the sex of these caresses to our delirious passion?’. It is Rachilde who did this, not the translator. Elsewhere, however, there is a mid-Atlantic problem at work in the translation. While one character interjects ‘what a ninny’ and ‘by Jove’, another says ‘jeez’, and the coarse Marie Silvert sounds very American saying, ‘nice try’, and ‘you gotta be kidding’, before reverting to the Brit ‘you can shrug all you want, you lot’. Still, it is the scandalous premise of Monsieur Vénus that counts, not its stylistic finery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".