With the aid of Nergal, who knows his Paris, Tammuz invites an attractive (and eligible!) male partner for each of his lesbian semi-converts, and amid a classical decor complete with Roman dining couches and phallic decorations, he treats the company to a banquet accompanied by aphrodisiac wines and incense. Then extinguishing the lights he leaves nature to take its course. Peladan fails to record the percentage of error in this quantitative experiment. (But at least one sadistic lesbian survives to figure in _La Vertu Suprême_.) Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and although his _reportage_ may not be dependable, there is much psychological soundness in his analysis of lesbian types, however melodramatic the personal histories he fabricates to account for them (and perhaps also to forestall attempts to identify their originals). The composite personality of Tammuz and Nergal is sound—the idealistic, somewhat effeminate man such as variant women are often drawn to. And in _L’Androgyne_,[30] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” of homosexual tendencies during male adolescence, he shows sympathy with the very type he scorned the Maupins for imitating, so long as it is a passing stage in male development. Just as evolutionary ideas were in the air long before Darwin systematized them, so the theory of emotional maturing now attributed to Freud was antedated in literature. Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias and their romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to widespread lesbianism in _fin de siècle_ Paris, and echoes of it and of the crop of fiction it bred must have been far reaching. Amusing proof of this fact is at hand in a light-hearted farce written in 1892 by two Americans, Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, entitled _A Florida Enchantment_. A transvestist tale, it involves no real intrasexual experience (in this respect harking back to medieval and renaissance romances), but its intent must have been unmistakable burlesque of such novels as Rachilde’s and Peladan’s. In Part I, “The Metamorphosis of Miss Lillian Travers,” the heroine discovers that her fiancé is dallying with a ripe widow, and at about the same time she acquires four seeds from an African “tree of sexual change.” Since the casket containing these is a relic from a slave-trading grandfather long dead, there is no chance of replenishing the supply. Embittered by her lover’s faithlessness, Lillian decides to move from the category of deceived woman into the obviously happier one of philandering man. To gain an ally in the venture she persuades her negro maid to join her in swallowing a seed, and both become sexually male, though to all ordinary appearances they are still women.