From the Belgian novelist Georges Écklioud came some years ago "Le Comte de la Digue" ("Escal Vigor") a story of tragic colouring, entirely pederastic in sentiment; the action taking place in a Flemish village. The aristocratic protagonist, is a homosexual of middle years. Intensely susceptible to the physical beauty of boys, ho falls in love at sight with a comely peasant-lad, whom he sees dancing in the firelight, at a rural festival. The boy becomes his; adoring his master and patron with an equally frank sexual surrender, regardless of consequences. The youth is torn to pieces by the furious villagers, whose morality is outraged to the point of madness. This book is perhaps Eckhoud's most representative one in its key.
The most elaborate, thoughtful French study in a novel of homosexualism, which the present writer has happened to meet—one not new—is "Les Hors-Nature" by "Rachilde" (Mme. Alfred Valette, one of the editors of "Le Mercure de France") which novel has been noted in another connection. "Les Hors-Nature", in fact, stands quite apart from other uranian tales in French belles-lettres, in its dignity, and in general individuality. In spite of a certain nervous roughness, and over-condensation of style, it has emphatic literary excellence; and in its psychology it has been carefully worked-up. It paints in nearly four hundred, pages, with much movement, the violent moral struggle of a mature man, highly intellectual, strong-natured, altruistic, austere (once meditating the priesthood but now agnostic) the Baron Jacques-Routier de Fertzen. He is indomitably proud, self-contained; is far from attractive in his herculean person. The object of his love is his young brother, Paul-Eric de Fertzen—a type as unlike Reutler as can well be, in his decadent and effeminized temperament. This young Parisian, Paul-Eric, about twenty years old, is a complex creation, but undeniably time to nature. His beauty is girlish, he has an hundred temperamental lapses toward womanishness; but
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