More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ _Méphistophéla_ (1890), mentioned earlier for its long popularity and its present rarity. It is also notable for the immense detail of the lesbian life history presented in its more than five hundred pages. It must have escaped the censor in its day because of its heavily moralistic tone and its literary style. Mendès, like Flaubert and Maupassant—though artistically far from their equal—was more subtle than naturalistic, and veiled his lurid facts in generalities that might glitter or smoulder but were unlikely to put specific notions in a reader’s head. Its prologue gives a sinister sketch of a drug addict in the act of a self-injection of morphine—a reassuring indication that no matter how she may appear to flourish in the course of the tale, she will come to no good end. Wealthy and proud as the heroine of _Monsieur Vénus_, modish as the Comtesse de Chalis, she has the debauched remnants of beauty; however, her lack of natural brows and lashes implies syphilis. She takes morphine to blot out some abysmal horror which has left its scar upon her. The author then unfolds the heredity and the erotic career which have brought her to her present pass. Sophie is the child of a bisexually promiscuous dancer by a Russian nobleman who laments his mistress’s pregnancy because his ‘rotten and accursed line’ should never be perpetuated. He dies almost immediately and the dancer, now fabulously wealthy, takes a house in Fontainebleau and raises Sophie in strict respectability. But even in childhood Sophie becomes so attached to a neighbor’s daughter, Emmaline, that a temporary separation brings on hysterical convulsions, dangerous fever and somnambulism. The two children have ‘played at marriage,’ a game of innocent embraces which brought vague shame to the other child, but seemed natural and acceptable to Sophie. With the approach of puberty the game is discontinued. During adolescence Sophie’s powerful but still unconscious sex drive leads her into emotional excesses, first in connection with confirmation, and later in the study of music and poetry. Through all these storms she sweeps the passive Emmaline along with hypnotic intensity, and the two girls are sometimes brought to the verge of fainting through unrelieved excitement. Recognizing the danger signals, Sophie’s mother arranges her daughter’s early marriage to Emmaline’s brother. Sophie, still physically ignorant, is so delighted at not losing her friend that she accepts the arrangement without question. The disillusionment of her wedding night drives her to an attempt to leap out the window, which her husband prevents. However, as soon as he is asleep she flees to Emmaline. Awakened by marital initiation to the significance of her feelings for her friend, she kisses the sleeping girl’s breast. The husband who has been searching for her, surprises her in the act, reviles her, and beats her senseless.