The text as it now stands is almost wholly in prose, and the few songs it contains have, like “The Triumph of Time” and “Dolores,” been published among Swinburne’s other poems. Nothing in it is at all daring; there is nothing to account for Lesbia’s variance, nor any indication of how far the relations between her and Leonora would have gone. But it is clear that Swinburne, like his hero, worshipped the repressed, intense and melancholy Lesbia, and despised Leonora, the bisexual wanton. A reasonable conjecture is that Lesbia’s early passions had been innocent; that even though despising Leonora she was unable to resist the other’s seduction; and that self-contempt motivated her suicide—a plot allowing plenty of latitude for the author’s intent to shock the British reading public. CHAPTER IV. THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY Fertility in France The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in France. As is usual in time of war, all fiction concerned with emotional subtleties dwindled, and the years from 1870 to 1880 produced comparatively few variant items. One, however, was significant in being the first novel to attack lesbianism as a moral and medical problem. It was Adolphe Belot’s _Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme_, and it began in 1870 as a serial in the newspaper _Le Figaro_. Westphal’s clinical report on a lesbian woman had appeared in Germany early in the year, and it seems probable that Belot capitalized at once on the interest it aroused in medical circles, turning out instalments with journalistic facility, for he produced popular novels by the dozen. Westphal had concluded that his patient’s compulsive homosexuality was not an isolated pathological streak in an otherwise sound nature, but a general state related to manic-depressive insanity (“_sogenannte folie circulaire_”), and Belot mentions early in his novel the sad difference between the French casualness with regard to lesbianism and the serious concern prevalent in Germany, although he does not enlarge upon the latter. The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it soon appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) before 1880.[1] All Belot’s novels exploited sex, the boldest requiring anonymous private printing, so that he was experienced in skirting the limits of acceptability. When the serial version was censored he had only to delete or alter condemned passages, amplify the virtuous tone of the unpublished portion (there is a moral harangue interpolated baldly in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity which censorship always provides.