There remains a famous lesbian group secluded in a chateau on the coast of Normandy to which he makes an unannounced visit. Here the leader is a Russian princess, whose name has become a byword for lesbian excess—possibly a satiric imitation of Méphistophéla. Tammuz finds the Princess Simzerla a proud but pathetic stripling of thirty whose excursions into vice have been, like Méphistophéla’s, a sterile quest for some satisfying love. Knowing all the gossip about her before leaving Paris, he offers his sympathetic and seemingly clairvoyant analysis of it to the princess while she is disguised as her own brother and unaware that he knows her identity. This kindly understanding, the first she has ever met, leads her—with time out for a quick change into feminine costume—straight into his arms. Tammuz, as always, has sufficient control to treat her as a sister, for he has decided that the way to ‘save Lesbos’ is not by converting any single individual to heterosexual passion, not even the notorious archetype, Simzerla, but by completely foregoing that physical victory against which most of them have rebelled. If he gives himself to one, his imaginative hold on all the rest is lost. He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those previously encountered, most of them near thirty and fugitives from Parisian notoriety. He spends some weeks studying them individually and collectively, leading them into such literary and philosophical discussion as they are capable of, and spying for passionate attachments. He is unable to discover that more than one couple indulges in any physical expression, and that is rather anemic. Furthermore, in the course of their group effort to write a lesbian drama he obtains final evidence to support what he has felt throughout his study (and, one might add, before he began): women have no powers of impersonal or abstract thought nor any creative intellectual capacity. It is he who contributes as much of the drama as is written. His final observation is made aboard the yacht of a Swedish-American transvestist known as the Phantom Princess, though she has acquired the actual name of Limerick from a British [sic!] peer, her deserted husband. Rumor has credited her with maintaining a floating ‘Lesbos’ to equal Simzerla’s, but Tammuz finds it no more than a luxury craft of masculine simplicity manned by a hard-bitten male crew. “La Fantôme” has experimented with both men and women more lustily than Simzerla, and is completely disillusioned about the existence of Love. Weary of sensual indulgence, she now permits herself no more than occasional voyeurism, having her crew bring aboard waterfront women for orgies which she observes from the captain’s bridge.