Jarry was not afraid to beg admission to the world of popular literature, from which he was excluded by the abstruse nature of the products of his own fertile imagination. Rachilde, more than thirty years after the event, recalled this exchange:

Rachilde's claim to have educated Jarry, is not, as we have seen, entirely without foundation, although this is often hard to see now that his fame has eclipsed hers. The fact remains, however, that in his lifetime Jarry was not a successful author; his reputation was built upon the notoriety of Ubu Roi and later upon the concise wit of his journalism. The bulk of his work only emerged from obscurity for the attention of later generations. His status as a writer who creates a synthesis of the work of his contemporaries could not easily be recognised at the time, needing the benefit of hindsight (‘nous ne disséquons point les auteurs vivants...’), particularly as Jarry's work appears, at first sight, so different from that of other writers of his period.

A problem unstated by Rachilde, indeed hard for her to grasp in her position in the artistic community, was that of just who ‘tout le monde’ actually were. The avant-garde scorned most mass-market authors (Pierre Loti being something of a bête noire for Jarry), and thereby became more and more incestuous – witness the spate of mutual admiration in print of which Faustroll forms a part. In seeking his literary models, Jarry turned to a peer group that was as much social as artistic, and thus doubly influential upon him; orphaned at the age of 21, he looked to literary circles as a second family.