Taken together, the five _Claudine_ novels present a complete sexual philosophy. It is Claudine’s progressive maturing under the influence of Renaud which weans her away from her variant leanings, but the influence is not one-sided. As their marital relationship deepens and mellows, Renaud is led to “love Love,” to be, as Claudine puts it, more “chaste,” less fond of sensual virtuosity “_qui s’aide d’une combinaison de miroirs ... et de mots fait pour le chuchotement et qu’on se force à crier à haute voix, tout crus_.”[7] In short, he has acquired a more feminine outlook. Here, in brief, is the distilled wisdom of the woman pronounced a genius in portraying the nuances of feminine psychology. Lesbian attractions are legitimate but they belong to youth. Mature love is neither uninhibited sophistication nor romantic idealism, but a mutual devotion in whose interest each sex must sacrifice something and must attempt to acquire some part of the other’s outlook. It has taken four decades of Freud and his successors to produce the almost identical wisdom which appears in all the better marriage manuals one reads today. One might say that although France did not contribute so much as Germany and England to the scientific study of sex, her long years of frank attention to it from the personal and literary angles bore fruit before the scientists’ harvest. The _Claudine_ series spanned seven years, but they were not the only works of their genre to appear in France. In the matter of public acclaim, perhaps the most important item was an opera, _Astarte_, presented by the Académie Nationale de Musique on February 15, 1901, with a score by Xavier Leroux, which critics characterized as Wagnerian, and a five-act libretto by Louis de Gramont. (It is cited in Martens’s _Book of Operas_ as _Omphale_, and was apparently composed in 1891, though there is no record of a dramatic performance before 1901.) The libretto has not been available, and the following account is drawn from the review by Breville in the _Mercure de France_ for April 1901, and the summary in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_[8] of an article in _Le Temps_ for February 20, by Pierre Lalo. The drama combines two episodes from the mythological cycle of Hercules: his bewitched assumption of woman’s dress and his death caused by the shirt of Nessus. Hercules is represented as going to Lydia to stamp out the infamous lesbian cult of Astarte by slaying Omphale, its high priestess. Instead, he is reduced by her seduction to abject slavery, forgetting all his previous triumphs and the purpose of his quest. Shedding his warlike accoutrements and ‘using the skin of the Nemean lion for a bedside carpet,’ he watches with fascination a lesbian ceremony which Breville pronounces one of the most beautiful ballets ever presented on the stage, ‘consecrated not so much to those _amours animales_ of which Verlaine speaks as to the harmonious disposition of groups and colors,’ its erotic climax being