If in sixteenth century France the final adjective carried its present meaning, and there seems no evidence to the contrary, this passage is certainly suggestive. In “Elégie III,” a kind of apologia for a life of emotional _Sturm und Drang_, she says she was only sixteen when she first suffered a devastatingly tragic love, but that she had already loved deeply twice before. She implores her townswomen as they read of her ‘amorous pains, regrets and tears’ not to condemn that “erreur de ma folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[7] This confession has disturbed some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she must have been a courtesan. Only a few of her lyrics reveal the sex of the person to whom they were addressed, an evasion more difficult in an inflected language than in English, and among those which do not betray it is the group that is acclaimed by critics as most distinguished by sincerity, frankness, and ‘an amazing freshness compared to her contemporaries.’[8] The descriptive touches in some of these sonnets, moreover, picture a loved one of more delicate beauty and a passion of less harsh and painful violence than the others. The assumption that she was a lesbian would explain her precocious passions and the number, variety, and anonymity of these later flames better than the hotly disputed courtesan theory, although she was undoubtedly bisexual and very ardent—“tous ses gouts furent des passions,” says one biographer. It would also explain the many, although comparatively unimpassioned, tributes written to her by male poets, for artists incline to be more tolerant of sex variance than the public at large, and they may possibly have gone on record in her favor because she suffered from social persecution. And finally, lesbianism would account for her estrangement from her younger friend, “of noble family and spotless reputation,” as well as any of the other theories advanced to that end. Until late in the nineteenth century a legend persisted that in the same year that Labé’s volume was published Clémence submitted verses of her own to her friend for criticism, but the latter instead of giving it “enleva a Clémence son amant,”[9] and it was suggested that Clémence’s death within the year was chargeable to this blow. This tale was fairly well discredited in 1877 by the Dutch scholar Boy;[10] however, nothing plausible has replaced it.