Adulteress stages a sequence described in Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Venus: a Materialist Novel (1884). This sequence sees the submissive, feminine Jacques Silvert slip away from Raoule Silvert (née de Vénérande), his domineering, masculine wife, to walk the streets in a black velvet dress and attempt to seduce a ‘real man’. In this chapter of Rachilde’s writing (which can be read on-screen across the duration of Adulteress) this transgression is experienced from the point of view of Raoule, who is wild with jealousy, and who tracks Jacques down at their friend M. de Raittolbe’s, where Jacques’s attempted seduction has been a spectacular failure, precipitating a suicide attempt and a duel to the death. The moving image counters this passage; we see someone playing Jacques enter a barn in Glasgow full of friends and well-wishers, where they meet someone playing Jacques’s sister, Marie, who does their make-up and hair and dresses them in a long black dress, with a mantilla. The film closes as they leave the barn to walk in public, while, due to the differences in filmic and textual time, the deadly consequences of Jacques’ adventure can be read on screen.
