For a time the Druid manages to prevent too great an intimacy between his “daughter” and Astrée, but when the two are guests at the same castle and share a room, the hero cannot resist taking some advantage of his opportunity, his only concern being dread of his lady’s reaction to these liberties when she is finally enlightened. This eventuality is postponed by enemy attack and a long embroilment during which “Alexis” fights as a heroic Amazon, saves Astrée’s life, is wounded, and is finally spirited away by the Druid to recover without danger of disclosure. When the revelation finally occurs, Astrée is indeed outraged—but note the reason: people will believe she merely pretended to be duped in order to excuse her own complaisances, and ‘in Forez a woman does not trifle thus with her honor.’ She bids Céladon die in expiation for his crime. “‘De quelle mort vous plait-il que je perisse?’ gémit Céladon écrasé. ‘N’importe, pourvu que tu meures!’ Et il s’enfuit pour la satisfaire.”[12] The Druid intervenes by proposing a pilgrimage to a shrine of Diana whose lions and unicorns slay the guilty but spare the pure. These heraldic guardians are transmitted into statues as the pair approach, thus testifying to the young lovers’ technical chastity. As everything short of the ultimate intimacy has pretty clearly occurred, it would appear that in France of the early seventeenth century, as in sixteenth century Italy, such relations between women were not regarded too harshly. Nevertheless, both this pastoral and Sidney’s portray the “far away and long ago,” not the authors’ own period, and d’Urfé’s tale is obviously more than a little satiric. Evidence will appear later that with regard to contemporary phenomena judgment is generally less lenient. The Borderline of Reality The five examples described above are all from the field of romance, in which no further variant flora have been detected until the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the whole field of fiction was largely fallow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the renaissance on, thanks to a growing classical influence and the weakening of churchly prejudice, drama of actable length gradually supplanted long formless narrative. But the drama, too, yields a thin harvest during these centuries. In romantic plays sex disguise was fairly common, but it produced no variant situations comparable to those cited from romance and pastoral. Action on the public stage, of course, cannot go as far as in the printed volume; furthermore, theatre audiences included lower class spectators more apt to be shocked by homosexual implication than educated readers with classical literary background.