identified themselves personally with it—we have Balzac, Huysmans, Pierre Loti, Verlaine, André Gride, Mendès, de Souillac, Henri d'Argis, Eckhoud, "Rachilde," Péladan, Adelswärd-Fersen: while the subject has also been at least abordé, incidentally but explicitly, by Zola, Paul Adam, Oscar Meténier, Abel Hermant, Willy, Colette Willy, Edmond Fazy, Achille Essebac, Norvèze, Nozière, Raymond Laurent, J.-A. Raimbaud, Pierre Louys, Lucien Descaves, and a long succession. This study cannot be an anthology of them, nor even an index. Two of Balzac's novelettes.deal with, respectively, the masculine and the feminine similisexuality—"La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin", and "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or"; and we remember how explicitly the dark and dingy "Maison Vauquer" was a "Pension Bourgeoise des Deux Sexes—et Autres." Joris Huysmans left "A Rebours," and a study (more such than story, so slight is that texture of the book) in his "Là-Bas", where we have not only an incidental "Black Mass" (not accurate however, in its details) but a sort of monograph on the career of the young Breton pederast, boy-murderer, and sorcerer, the Marquis Gilles de Rais (1404-40) to whom we shall refer under the topic of typical decadents. Pierre Loti's military and naval tales have already been touched upon; "Mon Frère Yves" and "Le Roman d'un Spahi" being typical. The voluminous fictionist and poet Catulle Mendès has written numerous homosexual sketches, almost invariably dealing with perversities. In the "Sodome" of Henri d'Argis is depicted a neurasthenic young uranian who after an agitating adventure with a physical hermaphrodite, falls in love with a beautiful youth named Henri Laus; has a stormy episode of his vita sexualis with him; and finally goes insane—the reader's last vista of him being a tableau of Laus watching his former protector "delivering himself up to a furious onanism", in the asylum-garden! These sorts of agrémens are typic of a large selection of French homosexual belles-lettres.
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