Made conscious also of possible physical intimacy between women, and knowing herself already branded in the town’s eyes as guilty of it, she goes through a period of acute temptation, and is restrained from making advances to a shopgirl only by the latter’s murmuring at a critical moment a phrase that Claire had often used.

It is only when World War I breaks out and Vermont is invaded by German troops that La Bonifas comes into her own. Then the disorganized community, abandoned by its craven officials, turns to the emerging recluse whose administrative ability, dauntless courage, and considerable cunning save it from complete ruin. Thereafter, Marie enjoys a position of honor. Her older enemies have died or fled, her younger persecutors have been drawn off into the army. Indeed, old enough by then to be the mother of the younger troops, and having won their respect, she feels only warm admiration for their strength. “Marie Bonifas had made her peace with men.” She is not, however, essentially altered even by this change in one of her basic attitudes. Her interest still centers about young girls and women. A daughter of her one-time “shepherdess” is now her own goddaughter, and Marie frequently visits her old school at the edge of town. The final scene in her drama occurs at a prize-giving fête at that institution when Marie, occupying a seat of honor, watches a dance-pageant presented by the students. At the sight of all this young beauty costumed with the freedom of the Twenties, and at the sound of a girl soloist rendering with fervor the lament from Gluck’s Orpheus, the famous woman dissolves in a passion of tears. It is the final irony of her life that one sympathetic observer should whisper to another that she must be thinking of a dead lover.

Exclusively variant women are rare in French fiction, and this long and careful study of one is easily the best of its sort the country has produced. Lacretelle has neither romanticized his heroine nor taken sides in the heredity-environment dispute. Both innate masculine traits and early conditioning start Marie on her variant way, and her later social persecution is due equally to her own temperament and to the town’s spiteful prejudice. This same temperament saves her from succumbing intellectually to feminism or to the specious medical lore on variance which she reads. She finds outlet for its strength only as the war provides her with a man’s job to do. As far as simple realism and dispassionate tolerance are concerned, La Bonifas has scarcely been bettered in any language.

Nothing could offer a sharper contrast than Bourdet’s drama, La Prisonnière (1925), which borrowed its title straight from Proust’s novel of the preceding year. Within eight months of its presentation at the Théâtre Fémina in Paris it was playing also in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and New York. The germ of the play is said to have been its author’s encounter during the war with a fellow officer who was deliberately seeking death as escape from domestic tragedy,[27] and the key character is this man’s wife, a lesbian who never appears on the stage. The heroine is a girl of twenty whom the older woman has captivated. As the play opens young Irene is struggling to remain in Paris against her father’s efforts to take her with him to Rome, where he is assigned to a diplomatic post. A widower, he has been accompanied on other missions by his mistress, as both his daughters know, but discretion dictates a more conventional ménage in Rome. When in desperation Irene pleads an impending betrothal as reason for her wishing not to leave Paris, her dictatorial parent takes matters in hand and in short order has made the pretended excuse a reality. So Irene must cope also with Jacques, the hitherto unsuccessful suitor (at that time happy with a mistress who hoped one day to be his wife). Jacques suspects that an old school friend, d’Aiguines, is Irene’s lover and the real reason for her staying in Paris, but when he approaches the latter, now married, he learns that it is Mme. d’Aiguines who is the object of Irene’s absorbing passion. His first reaction is one of relief, but the unhappy husband assures him that the case is much more serious than if it were a matter of another man.

At this point Irene begs Jacques to marry her or even to take her as mistress. She has been invited on a long cruise with Mme. d’Aiguines and knows that to go will mean her complete ruin. Whether her adored is cruel, or whether Irene fears social ostracism, is never clear—she merely implores her fiancé to “save” her. “It’s like a prison to which I must return captive, despite myself.” As a result Jacques makes her his wife, in spite of his friend’s warning and his own recognition of the other man’s wretchedness and premature aging. The couple spend a year away from Paris, but with their return the struggle begins anew. Irene has been a devoted wife and has severed all connections with her former love, but she has been able to feel no passion for her husband, and when an appeal comes from Mme. d’Aiguines, who is ill, Irene returns helplessly to the old bondage. As for Jacques, he is fortunate enough to discover his former mistress still unattached, and as she responds to his kisses he says merely, “How beautiful!! A woman!”

Despite the hints above that Irene’s captivity is purely physical and that she would like to escape it, all her symptoms throughout the play are those of romantic and imaginative love. Every moment apart from her friend is misery, and the violets she constantly receives become a romantic fetish. Bourdet has been skillful in portraying the effect on a number of persons of the conflict engendered in Irene by a love she feels to be guilty. But her own actual feeling for and relation with Mme. d’Aiguines are never made clear. It is, of course, easy to see why this play, even with such evasion of a major psychological issue, swept the western world while the superior efforts of Rolland and Lacretelle raised only slight critical ripples. Chiefly, it condemned lesbianism. But also Bourdet exhibited sheer inspiration in avoiding the direct presentation of a lesbian on the stage. For it is difficult to find an artistic middle ground between the unconvincing monster of hack writers and a character perhaps too sympathetic to please the strait-laced. Later his results will be compared with other plays appearing on the American stage.

* * *

A very few words will do justice to the inferior novels referred to above. Charles-Etienne’s Les Désexuées is concerned chiefly with male homosexuality, but a subsidiary plot is woven about Josette, childhood companion of one of the men, who, through acting in a lesbian drama, is drawn into an affair with the much younger ingenue. This ‘pitiful child’ adores her brilliant colleague until Josette gives way to passion, whereupon the girl feels she is being merely used as emotional outlet, and leaves the cast. Subsequent volumes, Notre Dame de Lesbos and Léon dit Léonie,[29] include liaisons between Josette and women attracted to her by her success in the dramatic role of Sappho, as well as a variety of other lesbians’ affairs. La Bouche Fardée centers about Gisèle, who enjoys a brief affair with her uncle and is pursued by both his son and his daughter, but her secret love is the nephew Claude, like herself an orphan, whom her uncle has brought home from Jamaica and to whom he is closely bound. In the end it appears that Claude is actually a girl, and she and Gisèle have one ecstatic night together, (though both are under suspicion of having murdered the uncle), before Claude is forced to flee back to the West Indies alone. Gisèle drifts through subsequent volumes picturesquely inconsolable. The situation here constitutes a triumph for lesbianism—a girl with satisfactory heterosexual experience still prefers to all other men the one who proves a woman in disguise. Of Inassouvie the main figure is a dominating woman ruthlessly bent upon an operatic career. Idol of the day school where she teaches singing, she holds “orgies” in her luxurious apartment with favorite pupils. The one girl who genuinely loves her is a fifteen-year-old with a tragic family background. The violence of this child’s affair with Adriane wrecks her fragile health, whereupon her brother and a friend use stolen snapshots of an orgy to break up Adriane’s engagement and injure her musical career. In the end, however, Adriane triumphs by trapping the two boys in a situation which compromises them as homosexuals, and she also takes violent revenge upon the elderly fiancé and his son who have repudiated her. In temperament she is related to Rachilde’s masculine heroines, and even more closely to the central figure of James Gibbons Huneker’s Painted Veils, first privately printed in English seven years earlier. The variety of Charles-Etienne’s lesbians and their experiences are reminiscent of Peladan, but he pretends to no high purpose, and indeed, the echoes in his work from known predecessors (Rachilde, Willy etc.) are sufficient to make one suspect synthetic inspiration from still others less familiar.

The nadir of quality was touched in Des Vignon’s Plaisirs Troublants, which like Le Journal d’une Saphiste pretended to attack lesbianism while including more scandalous detail than novels which tolerated it. This tale pictures the encounter in their middle-twenties of two friends who have known each other in public school, without dormitory intimacies. The more masculine is happily married, save that her husband is too absorbed in business to satisfy her. The other is a typist and the mistress of one of her employers whom she hopes to marry. The chance meeting ignites an infatuation which circumstances allow to flame for a week unchecked, and the consequences are disastrous. Erotic reveries leave Marceline unable to work and estrange her from her lover. Germaine is roused to make such excessive sexual demands on her husband and her maid that both fall ill. Marceline dies of tuberculosis; Germaine is saved by a cliterectomy and then childbearing. The ostensible theme of the book is the criminal waste in any sexual exercise save for the purpose of procreation, but the author’s real interest, quite as obviously as Montfort’s, is in sales, not reform.

This wave of homosexual fiction during the Twenties was heavy enough that a new periodical, Marges, circulated a questionnaire on the subject in 1926, soliciting ‘a certain number’ of current authors’ opinions on the social significance and moral effects of the abundant crop. If such established writers as Proust, Rolland and Colette were approached, they failed to reply. The thirty-odd answers varied from a Catholic’s terse quotation of St. Paul: “Let not the word be spoken among you,” to essays of several pages defending homosexuality as a recognized segment of human experience and a legitimate subject for literature. Everything from war, Freud, and athletics to decadence, avarice, and original sin, was blamed for the fictional epidemic. Suggested methods of combating it ranged from ignoring variant fiction in all review sheets to imprisoning and whipping its authors or committing them to asylums. The summarizing editor, throwing up his hands, suggested that some other magazine might like to attack the prevalence of heterosexual activity in current literature and devise some means of combating that![30]

While chance and not the Marges’ effort was probably responsible, review sheets actually did soon feature less variant fiction than before. For reasons quite unrelated to the dispute, Rachilde retired from the staff of the Mercure de France and Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch died, both before the end of the decade, and no equally serviceable records of variant titles replaced them. Therefore, most of the dozen French novels of the 1930s cited here or there as significant must pass without comment, since neither the volumes themselves nor adequate notes upon them have been accessible. Since the end of World War I much French fiction has appeared in English translation almost simultaneously with its home publication, and such titles will be left for consideration along with our own contemporary products. Two titles, however, must be mentioned here, for one, Suzanne Roland-Manuel’s Le Trille du Diable, has not been translated, and the other, André Gide’s Geneviève, though published in France in 1936, did not come out in English until 1950.

In 1929 Gide’s School for Wives showed the effect upon a submissive but intelligent girl of a love match with a man incapable of the least selflessness or intellectual honesty. A first sequel, Robert (1930), presented the husband’s view of the marriage and of his own undeserved suffering. The second, Geneviève, gave the daughter’s autobiography through adolescence. Geneviève begins her story at about fifteen with her infatuation for a schoolmate. Sara is the daughter of an artist and aspires to a stage career for which she appears well fitted. Geneviève’s father sharply opposes the friendship because of Sara’s bohemian background. Her mother, as always, stands between her daughter and her husband’s dictatorial harshness, although her own approval of Sara’s influence is not unqualified. Sara herself is emotionally unmoved, enjoying chiefly her domination of Geneviève and another girl whom she includes in a “secret society,” bound by distinctly feministic vows. The affair reaches its climax when Sara’s father exhibits a nude study, the face concealed by a hand mirror, for which the journals announce that his daughter was the model. Geneviève’s already half-wakened senses catch fire from this revelation of her beloved’s beauty, and she becomes ill with excitement and fury when her younger brother steals from her a magazine reproduction of the canvas.

Both mother and father are for once agreed that the association with Sara must be terminated, and Geneviève is withdrawn from her school and tutored by friends of the family. In the woman tutor she takes an intellectual interest only, for she is too closely bound to her mother to feel emotion for another woman of the same age. Her reaction to the man, a married physician, is more complex. She is not conscious of sexual attraction, is in fact repelled by the idea of sex and marriage, largely from observing her parents’ experience. She has also absorbed from Sara (an illegitimate child) a contempt for the conventions. As a feministic declaration of independence—on the conscious level—she asks her mentor to give her a child by him which will then be wholly hers to bring up. The good doctor, recognizing the immaturity and relative impersonality of her feeling for him, contrives to remain detached, fatherly, and helpful. Geneviève’s mother confesses to her later that she herself at a particularly trying stage of her unhappy marriage, was for a time in love with the doctor, and one infers the profundity of the daughter’s identification with her from the fact that the girl subconsciously turned to the same man.

Roland-Manuel’s Le Trille du Diable (1946) is reminiscent of Lacretelle’s La Bonifas in that its setting is a declining village and its heroine’s history is traced from about 1870 until after the first World War. But Florence Benoit, unlike Marie Bonifas, is a ruthless egotist who never serves anyone’s interest but her own. Spoiled daughter of a pretentious speculator, she anticipates wealth and a brilliant marriage as her due, and when M. Benoit dies impoverished she makes life a veritable hell for her mother and younger brother. She then steals a mediocre but kindly man from his fiancée and leads him much the same sort of life, later attempting also to dominate and possess her only child, a son sufficiently like her to defy her in the end.

Her earliest conquest is Augustine Virot, daughter of her father’s bookkeeper, a tall not too attractive girl with whom her association is innocent until after their hearing a charity concert in the neighboring city of Santerre. On this occasion Florence, then about fourteen, conceives a romantic infatuation for the violinist Soline, largely under the spell of his spectacularly brilliant encore, Le Trille du Diable. Although Florence does not see Soline again until she is past middle age, she nurses an undying passion for him which leads her into all manner of absurdities and against which all subsequent emotion seems pallid. As the title of the novel indicates, the author intends the meretricious musical number and its aftermath to epitomize an unwholesome flight from reality.

For several years after this fateful concert the two girls divert themselves by enacting love scenes between Florence and Soline, the latter impersonated by Augustine. Their caresses, progressively more intimate, finally become so necessary to both that, when Augustine enters normal school in Santerre, Florence fabricates excuses for visiting her there every week. To achieve privacy for their clandestine meetings she also invents elaborate lies which enable them to engage a succession of cheap hotel rooms for the afternoon, and so to play out their erotic ‘Soline’ improvisations without hindrance. The game loses interest for Florence as soon as she begins her conscienceless gamble for a husband, but she cannot let Augustine escape her, and she spoils the unhappy girl’s first engagement to a rather passive man by writing him slanderous anonymous letters, the same device as she has already employed to capture her own husband.

As for Augustine, the early playing of a male role plus the humiliation of her engagement’s unexplained ending turn her from any thought of marriage until middle age, when after a dreary stretch of elementary teaching, she finally accepts, faute de mieux, one of the town’s eccentrics at whom she had laughed as a girl.

As has been stated, the three or four subsequent variant French titles, all of which appeared in English within a year after their original publication, will be discussed with fiction in English.