Louÿs’s _Adventures of King Pausole_ published at the turn of the century is a rollicking tale, supposedly contemporary, but wholly fanciful in setting. One of its characters preaches the saving grace of healthy promiscuity as opposed to the prudish constraints of romantic love. Wholesome citizens, he says, come from the slums where children run loose. Strictness in raising the young, breeds maladjustment and neurasthenia. Voluntary exclusive devotion to one individual leads to the madness of an Orestes, the tragic end of a Marguerite, or the suicides of Romeo and Juliet. The lesbian pattern in his fantastic design is woven about Mirabelle, a danseuse reminiscent in physique and temperament of Maupin. She easily captivates the kings’ daughter, Aline, for, although the royal Pausole himself has a harem of 365 women, he has kept his child as secluded as Salammbo. Brought to his senses by Aline’s “elopement” with Mirabelle, and by several adventures he has while searching for the pair, the king embraces the doctrine of freedom for the young to the extent of smiling on Aline’s marriage (at fifteen) to a page who speedily converts her to the joys of heterosexual love. The dancer happily encounters a young noblewoman who, like herself, has known men but has dreamed of a woman partner, and their union apparently becomes permanent. Thus, Louÿs compromises between the promiscuity advocated by his spokesman in the book and the current romantic ideal. In the factual literature on homosexuality one finds ambiguous allusions to more variance in French fiction between 1880 and 1895 than it has been feasible to pursue, but considering the returns on those verified it is unlikely that any important lesbian works even of low quality have gone undetected. In 1896 Rachilde’s signed reviews began in the _Mercure de France_ and a little later the first bibliography of belles-lettres in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ listed a few retrospective titles along with current notes. These two systematic sources show that perhaps a dozen minor French novels appearing during the last half dozen years of the century (none were available for examination), dealt with variance to some extent. Such titles as _Mlle Wladimir_, _Mon Mari_ and _Satana_ indicate close imitation of such earlier successes as _Mlle Giraud_ and _Méphistophéla_. The majority seem to have made at least a pretense of condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde remarked acidly in reviewing one of them (Jane de La Vaudère’s _Les Demi-Sexes_, the theme of which was ovariotomy undergone by women sufficiently eager for masculinity) that she wished novelists would stop peddling sensationalism under the guise of medical instruction or moral preachment.[32] The cheery insouciance of _King Pausole_ was clearly an innovation and marked the beginning of a new period. As for the few novels published in Germany before 1900, since they were the first of their kind they will be left for