As to the young woman, her passion survives the revelation of Maupin’s sex, her persistent caresses prove as exciting as the man’s, and Maupin finishes by spending half the final night depicted with each of them and by riding off in the morning with markedly unfeminine detachment. Physically, we have for the first time in modern fiction the explicit description of a type which has since become associated with homosexual tendencies in women—the tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped figure endowed with perfect grace and with great skill in riding and fencing. Temperamentally we have Maupin’s own description of herself as “of a third sex, one that has as yet no name above or below.” As a girl she was “six months older but six years less romantic” than her bosom friend, for whom her friendship had “all the characteristics of a passion,” but for years she “burned in her little skin like a chestnut on the stove” to satisfy what is described as an intellectual curiosity about the lives of men away from women and their real attitude toward women.[24] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes as peculiarly masculine. Scattered through the story is a quantity of very canny analysis of intersexual characteristics, and though the tale is supposedly based upon the life of a seventeenth-century actress, it departs so far from the known facts about her that it must stand as a monument to the author’s psychological acumen alone. Since he wrote it at the age of twenty-four, one cannot escape the suspicion that it was drawn from personal or at least close secondhand acquaintance with George Sand, so newly come to Paris in her male costume and so prominent in literary circles at that moment. It certainly marks a long step forward in the serious study of a variant personality. (The actual history of Madeleine Maupin d’Aubigny,[25] late seventeenth-century singer and actress, is perhaps worth attention because of its contrast to Gautier’s artistic modification. As a young woman Maupin came to Paris from the provinces determined upon a stage career, and married her vocal teacher, d’Aubigny, who was connected with the Opera and who got her the position upon which she was set. The marriage was apparently a mere strategic move on her part and was short-lived. A tall woman, and a fencer of extraordinary ability, Mme. d’Aubigny frequently played young men’s parts, and soon took to wearing men’s costume off as well as on the stage. One of her diversions was roaming the streets at night and provoking men to cross swords with her for the pleasure of worsting them. She inspired passion in many young women, one of whom, a girl of good family, ran away with her when her repeated embroilments forced her to leave Paris. The girl’s parents overtook the eloping couple and put their daughter into a convent at Avignon.