The first is the work of Heinrich Mann, older brother of the more famous Thomas. His _Die Göttinnen_ (1902-03) is a trilogy within whose epic sweep he attempts to include every experience open to a woman of his time. Its subtitle is “Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy: Diana; Minerva; Venus.” But it is not under the aegis of Diana, as one might imagine, that the countess meets lesbian experience. The first volume (the only one available in English) is concerned with her devotion to the cause of Freedom, not for women, but political freedom for all oppressed people. Under the spell of Minerva in the second book her interest is turned to the arts, including letters. Though these two works are far from empty of dramatic emotional episodes, it is Venus who leads the countess at last to seek every possible form of love. After experience with several widely different male lovers, the most satisfying of whom is a younger man who ‘thinks like her,’ she returns to her mansion in Naples and takes ‘the one lover not yet tried—the crowd.’ She fills her house with beautiful young people in lieu of canvases and statues. ‘An unbroken stream of bodies which promised pleasure passed through her bedroom—slim delicate bodies and athletic, well-trained ones; the yielding firmness of girls and the delicate bones and melting flesh of children. The fisherman from Santa Lucia followed the clubman. The warm golden peasant girl with coarse heavy brows above her quiet eyes left the impress of her robust figure on the cushions where [a titled beauty] had lain; and she with her cold perfection interrupted the convulsive ecstasy of [another girl’s] first passion of surrender and abandon.’[18] When this comparatively tame promiscuity palls, the countess turns to sadism. Though never indulging actively herself, she provokes frenzied jealousy among her own and others’ lovers, and the resulting violence would equal, were it not merely suggested rather than amplified, any recorded by “the divine marquis.” After all this, by way of final experiment, the countess has staged for herself alone, and at enormous cost, a lesbian bout between two expert performers, girls already so spent with depravity that their flesh is ‘like a no longer fresh glove over a masterfully sculptured hand,’ At the end of their act they collapse, deeply unconscious, but the countess merely gazes down at them with weary disillusion. ‘“Is this all? Or have these sweet cheats, ripest of the lot, withheld some final sweetness? Alas, this fruit is like all the others. I myself shall never pluck it, and I would its taste were already gone from my lips.”’[19] The chief significance of this episode is its serving as climax to all that has gone before, evidently representing for the author the ultimate depths of sexual depravity.