The nadir of quality was touched in Des Vignon’s _Plaisirs Troublants_, which like _Le Journal d’une Saphiste_ pretended to attack lesbianism while including more scandalous detail than novels which tolerated it. This tale pictures the encounter in their middle-twenties of two friends who have known each other in public school, without dormitory intimacies. The more masculine is happily married, save that her husband is too absorbed in business to satisfy her. The other is a typist and the mistress of one of her employers whom she hopes to marry. The chance meeting ignites an infatuation which circumstances allow to flame for a week unchecked, and the consequences are disastrous. Erotic reveries leave Marceline unable to work and estrange her from her lover. Germaine is roused to make such excessive sexual demands on her husband and her maid that both fall ill. Marceline dies of tuberculosis; Germaine is saved by a cliterectomy and then childbearing. The ostensible theme of the book is the criminal waste in any sexual exercise save for the purpose of procreation, but the author’s real interest, quite as obviously as Montfort’s, is in sales, not reform. This wave of homosexual fiction during the Twenties was heavy enough that a new periodical, _Marges_, circulated a questionnaire on the subject in 1926, soliciting ‘a certain number’ of current authors’ opinions on the social significance and moral effects of the abundant crop. If such established writers as Proust, Rolland and Colette were approached, they failed to reply. The thirty-odd answers varied from a Catholic’s terse quotation of St. Paul: “Let not the word be spoken among you,” to essays of several pages defending homosexuality as a recognized segment of human experience and a legitimate subject for literature. Everything from war, Freud, and athletics to decadence, avarice, and original sin, was blamed for the fictional epidemic. Suggested methods of combating it ranged from ignoring variant fiction in all review sheets to imprisoning and whipping its authors or committing them to asylums. The summarizing editor, throwing up his hands, suggested that some other magazine might like to attack the prevalence of heterosexual activity in current literature and devise some means of combating that![30]