As in pre-war years, during this third decade variant novels of all qualities swarmed from the presses: Proust’s _Sodome et Gomorrhe_ (1921-22), _La Prisonnière_ (1924), and _Albertine Disparue_ (1925); in 1925 also, Jacques Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ and Edward Bourdet’s _La Prisonnière_; and scattered over the same and later years, a shower from the pen of one Charles-Etienne (an inferior disciple of Willy), and a blast from Max DesVignons as hypocritical as Montfort’s and La Vaudère’s prototypes of twenty years earlier. Lacretelle’s novel, translated into English as _Marie Bonifas_ in 1927, is worth special note. Its central figure is a motherless child of four or five, stocky and ugly, when her father settles in the decaying Picard hamlet of Vermont. Once thriving, the town has declined into a dreary aggregate of men like the retired Major Bonifas, unmarriageable girls, and acid gossips who spy upon each other behind half-closed shutters. This country backwater, so different from the urban setting of most variant fiction, is Marie’s lifelong home. The story covers the half century preceding World War I. Brought up roughly by her hard drinking parent and an ill-tempered servant, Marie’s life is uneventful until a gentle country girl replaces the old shrew and becomes at once mother, playmate, and tutor. Marie blossoms as her adoring satellite, experiencing (as early as her tenth year) a sensation she thinks of as “melting” when Reine caresses her. She develops an antipathy to her father’s drunken coarseness, and resents both his attentions to Reine and the bold admiration of soldiers and country louts whom the girl attracts. This childhood idyll has a shocking end when Reine, pregnant by the Major, throws herself from a window and dies within a few hours. The curses of her peasant mother convey the essence of the tragedy, though no understanding of its details, to the terrified and prostrated child. A stronger conditioning against men could hardly be devised.