l’exaltation d’une Persane.” The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a two-volume novel by Henri de Latouche entitled _Fragoletta_ (1829), which is concerned primarily with the Napoleonic wars and anti-British propaganda. Emotional interest centers about the hero’s love for the title figure, whom he first meets as a boyish girl of fourteen, daring, brilliant, and free of coquetry. Her Sicilian guardian, knowing himself pursued by political assassins, implores d’Hauteville to marry and care for Fragoletta, but d’Hauteville feels that his love for her has roused no response save lively friendship and so waits for her emotions to mature. On the guardian’s death he becomes her protector until the misfortunes of war separate them. Later he hears she has returned to her native Austria from which she was removed as an infant. She writes him of discovering there a twin brother, Adriani, who eventually visits d’Hauteville in his Paris home and falls in love with his sister, an untouched innocent a year Adriani’s senior. Sent as a spy to Naples, d’Hauteville sees Fragoletta there at a court ball given by Queen Caroline, at which Lady Hamilton is a guest. He hears that Adriani is a spy on the English-Neapolitan side, but because of the need for concealing his own identity he can neither reveal himself to Fragoletta nor penetrate the mystery of her presence among the English and her brother’s treasonous activity. He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani has seduced her and that she no longer wishes to live. Her mother also has fallen gravely ill of the shock. D’Hauteville pursues the boy to Paris only to find him gone again and his sister on her deathbed. Subsequently, he tracks the traitor-seducer back to Naples and challenges him to a duel. Fragoletta, still in Naples, begs him not to expose himself to certain capture by the enemy merely in order to avenge “un tort exagéré ou peut-être imaginaire,” implying that only his sister’s naïvete led her to believe herself ravished. D’Hauteville persists in duelling, however, and overcomes his opponent without effort. Adriani retreats almost without resistance over the edge of a cliff and falls to death in the sea below with a feminine cry which reveals to d’Hauteville that Fragoletta and her twin are one. The reader is left in doubt whether Fragoletta was, like Clémentine, a hermaphrodite, or (as seems more probable) was simply an exclusively lesbian woman. (Similarly the Chevalier d’Eon moved in international diplomatic circles alternately as man and woman, his true sex being known only upon his death in 1810.) In the course of the story the author incorporates a scene between Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton which takes place in the former’s sunken marble bath. The queen first plays the part of lady’s maid in disrobing her beautiful friend, and later indulges in erotic play until the two drowse off in one another’s arms in the warm pool.