The emotional life of the hero, Hubert, up to the time of his meeting with Lesbia is said to be a quite frank parallel of Swinburne’s own. The critical first encounter occurs while Hubert is dressed as a girl, and this disguise is responsible for Lesbia’s immediate interest. Their subsequent relations are not developed in the portions of the story that Swinburne committed to paper, nor is much of Lesbia’s experience save her eventual slow suicide by opium, in an atmosphere heavily fragrant with flowers and eau de cologne. Among the disconnected residual fragments are two: “Turris Iburnea” and “La Bohème Dédorée,” in which the poet presents Leonora Harley, a beautiful but vulgar and stupid demi-mondaine. This character was said to be drawn directly from Adah Isaacs Menken, who was also the original of his “Dolores”—a fifteen page description of an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is reason, as will appear later, to believe that Menken’s temperament included a variant strain. That Swinburne intended to make use of this in his plot is strongly suggested by the following: Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of her professional art [that of courtesan]. It was not her fault if she could not help asking her young friend [Hubert] when he had last met a dark beauty: she had seen him once with Lesbia.[50] Further evidence that he planned to incorporate a lesbian element in the story is found in his correspondence of 1866, where he boasted that having won an undeservedly scandalous reputation because of that element in _Poems and Ballads_, he meant to live up to it in his current effort, which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine horror.[51] It is known that Swinburne was still at work on the manuscript in 1867 when his meeting with Mazzini deflected his interests into new channels. After the years of political discipleship which produced _Songs Before Sunrise_, he returned to the interrupted narrative. Following that, its history becomes confused. Certain passages in the hands of his publishers reached the stage of galley proof but became mixed with proofs of other incomplete work. Sections of manuscript entrusted to his good friend, Watts-Dunton, were “mislaid,” and the poet’s repeated pleas and complaints never stimulated him to find them. Though Langdon Hughes finds Watts-Dunton guilty of criminal rascality,[52] one cannot help wondering whether all this apparent carelessness may not have been well-meant discretion.