Lamartine’s effort to explain the girls’ passionate friendship is interesting if seemingly somewhat confused. Primarily, like Diderot, he lays responsibility upon the convent environment, where not only are women segregated but every aspect of their life—music, incense, pageantry, solitude and idleness—inflames the ‘imagination,’ while the feeble pretense at education includes nothing to stimulate or discipline the intellect. Such life produces ‘veritable orientals, fit only for the harem.’ The specific occasion of their emotional involvement, however, he says, is Regina’s identification of Clothilde with the unknown brother of whom the latter talks so eloquently. ‘I should never have believed in this phenomenon, which reflects and thus redoubles the beloved object, I should have taken it for the imaginative creation of poets, had I not seen it with my own eyes in the spirit of Regina.’[29] This seems a rather feeble attempt to gloss over any homosexual implication, for Clothilde, though more intellectual and less passionate than Regina, is in no way masculine. And, in the end, it was precisely the masculine element in Saluse’s sacrifice of their love which repelled Regina. It was a man’s decision and not a woman’s, ‘of the head and not the heart.’ Lamartine’s treatment here of the variant theme gains added interest from the fact that earlier, in _Jocelyn_, he had sailed perilously close to the implication of male variance. In this story, popular enough to supply the libretto for Godard’s opera, a hermit priest becomes so attached to the “boy” left in his charge that he suffers agonies of conscience before discovering that his ward is a disguised girl. Evidently the whole matter of possible intrasexual attraction held a kind of fascination for Lamartine, though he treated it with a reserve more Victorian than French. Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, _La Sapho_, cited by Lewandowski in _Das Sexualproblem ..._[30] as definitely lesbian, and of added interest in that it was written by a woman, Céleste Venard comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not been available for examination. At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published _Salammbo_, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made his heroine homosexual.[31] If this is true at all by modern standards the condition is latent and of short duration, but because of the expressed judgment of so prominent an early authority on sex variance the story will be examined in some detail. It will also be interesting to see with what “pitiless method” Flaubert dissects the emotional economy of an inhibited girl. To be sure Salammbo’s adolescent devotion to the virgin moon-goddess Tanit (comparable to the Greek Astarte and the Roman Diana, and allied also to the Roman Bona Dea) verges upon passion, but it is so described as to suggest the sexual overtones in any ecstatic religious experience rather than to imply a variant element.