For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary quality, Philip Cuisin’s _Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne_ (1819). As its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the heroine’s variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a plot of the wildest extravagance. _Clémentine_ is a beautiful child of unknown antecedents cast ashore near Carcassone as sole survivor of a shipwreck. With the approach of puberty her ambiguous sex makes her the object of so much superstitious hostility among the peasants of the neighborhood that she is sent by her wealthy protector to a physician in Cadiz who is glad of the chance to observe such an anomaly. A child’s unawareness of her own peculiarity had betrayed her to the peasants of Carcassone. Shocked into neurotic prudery she manages in Cadiz to avoid suspicion though not curiosity on the part of the physician’s daughter, who becomes strongly attached to her and is hurt by her refusal of the easy intimacy common among growing girls. Clémentine canalizes her waxing male eroticism into strenuous physical exercise and becomes a proficient fencer. This unfeminine skill and her habit of going about occasionally in men’s clothing produce violent infatuation in a bold young woman of the neighborhood who believes her to be a man, and who plays thereafter the role of villain in the piece. Because of this woman’s advances, Clémentine is forced to leave her second home in Cadiz and is subsequently involved in a series of stormy adventures. She is too feminine to live out her life disguised as a man, too relentlessly pursued by her evil adorer to settle down as an independent woman and win a man she has come to love. An interim in a convent, where she takes refuge from the law after killing a man in a duel, naturally only produces fresh complications. Here she, herself, is passionately drawn to the urbane Superior who cherishes her, and a novice is similarly attracted to her; but she resists all temptations (and they are many) to give way to her feelings. At last obstacles are overcome according to the best romantic pattern—she marries her male beloved, who understands and accepts her anomaly, encourages her to fence and hunt with him, and enjoys her love, which has “la force réuni des deux sexes.” The author must have read the contemporary literature on hermaphroditism, but was evidently shy of attributing his heroine’s passionate intensity to her anomaly after once he had her settled as a married woman, and so lays it in part to prenatal influence. Her mother, we are told, had during pregnancy been very friendly with a Persian ambassador to the French court, and had been “saturated” with his oriental tales. Thus, the daughter was predestined to love “avec