For several years after this fateful concert the two girls divert themselves by enacting love scenes between Florence and Soline, the latter impersonated by Augustine. Their caresses, progressively more intimate, finally become so necessary to both that, when Augustine enters normal school in Santerre, Florence fabricates excuses for visiting her there every week. To achieve privacy for their clandestine meetings she also invents elaborate lies which enable them to engage a succession of cheap hotel rooms for the afternoon, and so to play out their erotic ‘Soline’ improvisations without hindrance. The game loses interest for Florence as soon as she begins her conscienceless gamble for a husband, but she cannot let Augustine escape her, and she spoils the unhappy girl’s first engagement to a rather passive man by writing him slanderous anonymous letters, the same device as she has already employed to capture her own husband. As for Augustine, the early playing of a male role plus the humiliation of her engagement’s unexplained ending turn her from any thought of marriage until middle age, when after a dreary stretch of elementary teaching, she finally accepts, _faute de mieux_, one of the town’s eccentrics at whom she had laughed as a girl. As has been stated, the three or four subsequent variant French titles, all of which appeared in English within a year after their original publication, will be discussed with fiction in English. CHAPTER VIII. FICTION IN GERMANY Before 1914 Insofar as secondhand information is to be trusted, it appears that female variance figured but twice in German fiction before the late 1890s. Lewandowski’s _Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur und Kunst ... seit 1800_ lists Johannes Flach’s _Sappho: Griechische Novelle_ (1886) under the heading of homosexual literature without further comment. The _Jahrbuch_ during 1907 cited a passage from a romantic novel of the 1820’s, Ernst Wagner’s _Isidora_, which describes the same sort of innocent play between a princess and her maid-in-waiting as Lamartine pictured in “Regina,” with the difference that the bond between Wagner’s two girls appears wholly physical.[1] As Lewandowski’s criterion for inclusion seems to have been overt sexual action, he may have omitted subtler studies of variance; and Hirschfeld’s frankly biased journal was not too much concerned with discreditable bisexual records. Therefore it is possible that nineteenth-century German novels comparable to Balzac’s _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ or _Cousine Bette_ were passed over as negligible. But when one recalls the emptiness of the record in English during the same period, and remembers that in the matter of feminine mores Germany resembled Victorian England rather than France, any exhaustive reading of German fiction promises rewards incommensurate with the labor involved.