A very few words will do justice to the inferior novels referred to above. Charles-Etienne’s _Les Désexuées_ is concerned chiefly with male homosexuality, but a subsidiary plot is woven about Josette, childhood companion of one of the men, who, through acting in a lesbian drama, is drawn into an affair with the much younger ingenue. This ‘pitiful child’ adores her brilliant colleague until Josette gives way to passion, whereupon the girl feels she is being merely used as emotional outlet, and leaves the cast. Subsequent volumes, _Notre Dame de Lesbos_ and _Léon dit Léonie_,[29] include liaisons between Josette and women attracted to her by her success in the dramatic role of Sappho, as well as a variety of other lesbians’ affairs. _La Bouche Fardée_ centers about Gisèle, who enjoys a brief affair with her uncle and is pursued by both his son and his daughter, but her secret love is the nephew Claude, like herself an orphan, whom her uncle has brought home from Jamaica and to whom he is closely bound. In the end it appears that Claude is actually a girl, and she and Gisèle have one ecstatic night together, (though both are under suspicion of having murdered the uncle), before Claude is forced to flee back to the West Indies alone. Gisèle drifts through subsequent volumes picturesquely inconsolable. The situation here constitutes a triumph for lesbianism—a girl with satisfactory heterosexual experience still prefers to all other men the one who proves a woman in disguise. Of _Inassouvie_ the main figure is a dominating woman ruthlessly bent upon an operatic career. Idol of the day school where she teaches singing, she holds “orgies” in her luxurious apartment with favorite pupils. The one girl who genuinely loves her is a fifteen-year-old with a tragic family background. The violence of this child’s affair with Adriane wrecks her fragile health, whereupon her brother and a friend use stolen snapshots of an orgy to break up Adriane’s engagement and injure her musical career. In the end, however, Adriane triumphs by trapping the two boys in a situation which compromises them as homosexuals, and she also takes violent revenge upon the elderly fiancé and his son who have repudiated her. In temperament she is related to Rachilde’s masculine heroines, and even more closely to the central figure of James Gibbons Huneker’s _Painted Veils_, first privately printed in English seven years earlier. The variety of Charles-Etienne’s lesbians and their experiences are reminiscent of Peladan, but he pretends to no high purpose, and indeed, the echoes in his work from known predecessors (Rachilde, Willy etc.) are sufficient to make one suspect synthetic inspiration from still others less familiar.