In the following year (1902) a novel of less artistry voiced strong disapproval of lesbianism. Charles Montfont’s _Journal d’une Saphiste_ is an autobiography which follows Aline from her first boarding school initiation at the age of ten into her middle twenties. Her second love, beginning in adolescence, is for the delicate and feminine Mirette, an orphan who spends vacations in her home. Since Aline is motherless and her father without suspicion, the two girls enjoy a protracted affair until the father arranges a marriage for Aline. Her husband, alerted by her docile frigidity and by watching her with her friend, tells her she must choose between them. She chooses Mirette. Her father dies financially ruined, and as her ex-husband will understandably enough contribute nothing to her support, she is obliged to keep herself and her love by selling herself secretly to one of her husband’s friends. Mirette senses the truth, and, already weakened by passionate excesses, dies in raving delirium. Aline ends her diary with an exhortation: ‘Women, seek only the love that all mankind honors, the healthy and honorable, because fertile, love of men,’ and leaves the document to a friend as a warning to all girls and schoolmistresses against ‘the extravagant madness of lesbian love.’ The implication is that she then commits suicide. The entire book, while using moral tags at beginning and end to placate the censor, is written with detail bordering on pornography, and Mirette’s death is as much medical nonsense as was Annhine’s mentioned above, or Mlle Giraud’s from meningitis. * * * * * As was said earlier, the dozen years before World War I produced as many variant novels of diverse quality as appeared in the 1890s. These ranged from Morel’s _Sapho de Lesbos_ and Fauré’s _La Derniere Journée de Sapho_, both of which whitewashed their classical heroine; through Willy’s _La Môme Picrate_, in which the lesbian motif is incidental, and de Régnier’s _L’Amour et le Plaisir_, a clever imitation of eighteenth century farce; to LePage’s _Les Fausse Vierges_ and Hoche’s _Le Vice Mortel_, melodramas holding lesbianism responsible for murder and suicide in improbable circumstances.[11] The only novel to rate serious consideration in both the _Mercure_ and the _Jahrbuch_ was Daniel Borys’s _Carlotta Noll, Amoureuse et Femme de Lettres_ (1905).[12] In this book, the heroine’s passion for a famous male literary colleague is supplanted by infatuation for the homosexual Myrtil, who lures her into active lesbianism and introduces her to the fatal habit of inhaling ether as well. (Annie in _Claudine s’en Va_ had a similar fondness for chloroform. _Sic transeunt_ modes in drugs!) When Carlotta is finally abandoned by Myrtil she suffers general paralysis and ends in an institution. The book’s chief claim to critical attention seems to have been its prose style, which notably resembled that of Louÿs.