The final French writer of importance to treat of lesbianism before the turn of the century was Pierre Louÿs, who wrote more in the spirit (though not the style) of Gautier, Verlaine or Zola than in that of his contemporary anti-lesbian crusaders. His _Chansons de Bilitis_ (1894) and _Aphrodite_ (1896) purported to be the fruit, respectively, of translation and intensive classical research, and to give accurate pictures of life in early Greece and Alexandria. Classicists promptly exploded his claim and accused him of sensational exaggeration; nevertheless the two works enjoyed enormous popularity at the time and have since been reissued every few years in English as well as French. The _Songs of Bilitis_, in free verse reminiscent of the Greek Anthology, pictures the life of a girl from her bucolic childhood in Pamphilia, through young womanhood on the isle of Lesbos, to her end as a prosperous courtesan in Cyprus. In her teens she bears a child but leaves it behind without a qualm when adventure leads her on. The emotional highlight of her roving existence is the period in Mitylene, during which she loves and marries another girl with whom she lives happily and faithfully for a decade. However spurious their Hellenism, the poetic quality of the _Chansons_ is high, and they have been repeatedly imitated and translated in English, German, Swedish, and Czech. One German translation of twenty-four of the songs was made by Richard Dehmel, a poet in his own right. In _Aphrodite_ lesbianism is only incidental, but still it recurs throughout, including the daily ministrations of a slave girl to a courtesan mistress who accepts them as she does her bath or food; the courtesan’s intermittent play with a pair of younger flute-girls; and the flute-girls’ marriage, like that of Bilitis, in which they find solace for the depravities they must see and endure as paid entertainers. That Louÿs was aware of every possible sort of lesbian activity is evident, but confining his attention as he does to courtesans, he adds little to an understanding of variant relationships among other classes of women. It is the taller and stronger of his pairs who always plays the male role, and the only other suggestion of etiology is the excessive worship of female beauty, dominant in the cults of Isis or Aphrodite. It was in this respect particularly that he was accused of distorting historic fact. As Louÿs pictures this worship, it is closely related to feminine narcissism.