In the course of the same years Zola’s literary torrent was beginning to flow, and it is known that many of his novels, notably those treating of metropolitan life in Rome, London and Paris, include incidental sketches of variant women. No pretense can be made here to having read or even skimmed his entire output, but _La Curée_ (1874) may be cited as a sample appearing during the decade in question. The significant figures are a pair of wealthy young married women who appear intermittently among the numerous background figures who are regularly referred to as “the inseparables” by their friends, and by the author, and who are strongly reminiscent in both appearance and behavior of Mlle Giraud and Mme. Blangy. As with the latter pair, their friendship is said to have begun in boarding school and to have continued uninterrupted by their respective marriages, but it has no dramatic outcome nor any important significance to the plot. As was said in introducing the nineteenth century, the last two decades saw a sharp increase in all sorts of writing on variance. In the scientific field the great names were Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, and Hirschfeld, the last three being crusaders for official leniency and general tolerance on the grounds that homosexuality is inborn and therefore should not be penalized. There was much talk of an “intermediate sex,” whose condition was referred to as “inversion” (Ellis’s term). The term _perversion_ was confined to those who were able to find heterosexual satisfaction and whose homosexual activities were therefore judged to be willful and unjustified. This hereditary view did not gain popular currency until late in the century, but as it spread, the controversy it engendered began to be reflected in fiction. * * * * * With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, starting with Zola’s _Nana_. In this well-known life history of a courtesan the reader will recall the gradual progress of the robustly heterosexual heroine from revulsion against an affair between her friend, Satin, and Mme. Robert and against the lesbian society of the fat Laure’s cafe, through indifferent tolerance of such activity, to her own final active relations with Satin which end only at the latter’s death. (This premature death carries a faint implication that Satin’s long sustained lesbianism was less healthy than Nana’s predominantly heterosexual life). All the stages of Nana’s habituation to homosexuality are presented with the same naturalism which marks Zola’s portrayal of her other affairs, and there can be little doubt that his material was drawn from direct observation of the Paris underworld.