Thus, the faithful observer of the Human Comedy presented three contrasting types of emotional variance and offered three distinct explanations of it. In the first, intellectual conditioning was the causal factor; in the second, a possible inheritance of temperament plus the certain freedom for self-indulgence provided by limitless wealth; and in the third, poverty of both circumstance and emotional opportunity. The resulting experiences also show the writer’s imaginative range. The first seraphic heroine is as innocent and passionless as the biblical Ruth. The Spanish Marquise is violent to the point of melodrama. The warped spinster is confused and groping in expression as well as feeling. In the same year that _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ appeared, Gautier published _Mlle de Maupin_. The former enjoyed a few months’ priority, but Gautier’s volume had been promised to the publisher a year before its appearance, and as the two men’s long friendship began only with Balzac’s reading of the younger man’s story,[23] there is no question of influence in either direction. From the standpoint of modern psychology Gautier’s is the more careful and complete study. Indeed, having humor, vitality, and a tolerant bisexual attitude, it is probably the most generally popular of all variant “classics.” In it an orphaned heiress dons men’s clothes and sets out to discover how men live when uninhibited by the presence of ladies. In the course of her adventures Maupin is loved by a young man of poetic temperament who has had mistresses but found them physically satisfying only, and by a young woman of good social standing who has been one of those mistresses. Maupin also has with her for a time a young girl disguised as a page whom she has rescued from exploitation by an old rake and on whom she lavishes a devotion both erotic and maternal. The young man suffers from believing his passion abnormal until he learns Maupin’s true sex, but then recognizes that for the first time he has found complete love because he has so many more tastes in common with this girl than with his previous feminine paramours.