When, after months of carnage, Matho is taken captive and literally torn to pieces by the people of Carthage, Salammbo is witness to his terrible death. Instead of sharing in the shrieking triumph of the populace, she “could once more see him in his tent, clasping his arms about her waist, stammering gentle words. She thirsted to feel and hear those things again and was at the point of screaming aloud.” And when Matho “fell back and moved no more,” Salammbo also collapsed into unconsciousness from which she never recovered. The concluding words of the book are: “So died Hamilcar’s daughter, because she had touched the mantle of Tanit.” Flaubert’s novel carries symbolic overtones not apparent in brief summary, and since Tanit was allied to the Roman Bona Dea, goddess of sexual fulfillment and fertility, her Zaimph doubtless represents heterosexual passion. Salammbo, conditioned to asceticism throughout her early life, dies of the unresolved conflict between these two dominating drives. * * * * * A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly lesbian in theme”[39] may shed some light on what he intended by the term. It is Ernest Feydeau’s _La Comtesse de Chalis_ (1867), in which a dashing Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular husband for a spectacular career in _le haut monde_. An idealistic and infatuated professor of the new _Ecole Normale_, who is keenly aware of belonging to a lower social class, ruins himself financially in his attempt to maintain a place in the countess’s world. The story, told by him, is chiefly concerned with his efforts to save her from the frivolous and corrupt life of her circle. Her evil genius is a fabulously wealthy Prince Titiane, diseased and depraved at twenty-one, whom she repeatedly promises to dismiss from her life but to whose influence she continuously succumbs. She goes gradually from bad to worse, and ends by consorting _à trois_ with him and one of the city’s celebrated courtesans, his long-time mistress; however, this situation develops only in the last pages of a lengthy volume. The Prince is described throughout as so effeminate in appearance, dress, and appurtenances that it would be easy to imagine him a woman in disguise, but there is no textual support for such an inference. Late in the story it develops that it is solely his use of the whip which binds the countess to him, and that this flagellation is without sexual sequel, since Titiane is impotent.