Aside from being unusually tall and arrogant, the countess has no masculine attributes whatever, either physical or psychological, and it is never she who wields the lash. Her dominant motive is an egotistic compulsion to be the most dazzling figure in Paris. Since the fantastic young Croesus, Titiane, is the arbiter of social destinies in her particular world, she is slavishly submissive to him. Her interest in the courtesan, though it is charged with emotion throughout, appears to be the obsession of an ambitious woman with the techniques of a serious rival, and the emotion is predominantly jealousy. Her final indulgence in sexual promiscuity results from her determination to be outdone by that rival in no field whatsoever. Analyzed by a modern psychiatrist, the countess would be diagnosed as a complete narcissist, unable to care the slightest for anyone but herself. Consideration of these two novels suggests that to Krafft-Ebing any failure of feminine heterosexual adjustment was included in that “contrary sexual feeling” which was equated throughout his later study with active homosexuality. As we have seen, modern psychoanalysts consider narcissism and homosexuality as closely related in etiology; yet it is confusing to have the more specific term applied to experiences which, like Salammbo’s and the countess’s, include relations with men and none with their own sex. “Mainly lesbian in theme” _La Comtesse de Chalis_ certainly is not. The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s _La Comtesse_ was bracketed with Gautier’s _Mlle Maupin_ and Balzac’s _Girl with the Golden Eyes_ may also have contributed to Krafft-Ebing’s thinking it more “lesbian” than it is. Indeed, the modern investigator sometimes suspects that scientific writers had not read all of the belletristic titles they referred to but were satisfied to rely on the word of others with respect to them. Another detail which might have strengthened an impression of similarity to Balzac is Feydeau’s denunciation of _le haut monde_ in imitation of Balzac’s earlier indictment of metropolitan life in general. The new element in Feydeau is acute class consciousness in his condemnation of the “idle rich.” However second-rate from an artistic standpoint _La Comtesse de Chalis_ may be, it is a remarkably exact contemporary record of “the mixture of splendor and misery ... the sense of uneasy satiety, of restless torpor, of indefinable dread” described by the modern Albert Guérard as prevailing in the late Second Empire.[40] Evidence from Poets