Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/344

 in France, though mostly ephemeral. An unpleasing trait of it is the tendency to depict the trivial, the effeminate, the decadent, the vicious phases; rather than those which are virile, wholesome and of finer psychic quality. Here the French man of letters, and French woman of letters, are,in key with the French homosexualism, which turns toward neurotisms, perversities, effeminacy, to the grossly sexual—to the decadent in general. In France the pederastic passion for the very youthful minor is strong. In no other European country are small hoys so much in demand by debauched elders, or by 'clients' by no means elderly. To a large contingent of Frenchmen who write 'eccentric' literature, or what passes for literature, homosexuality means merely a vitiating eroticism—hermaphroditism, orgies of jaded men with chlorotic youths, womanish in psychos and body. In other nationalities (as for example the teutonic) poets and novelists present, as a rule, a more wholesome uranianism; seldom laying stress on debauched febrilisms of Parisian kind. But the French novel-writer in the intersexual field delights in tableaux of obscene détraqués. Unnatural homosexuality, masochism, bestiality, flagellation, erotic manias, are incessant ingredients. The French Uranian seems hag-ridden by debased fancies and phases. This is typified in the romances of the infamous Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) whose stories "Justine", "Julie" etc., minutely pourtray almost everything that is repulsive in a diseased uranian psychos. The sex-emotions of de Sade himself, were maniacal vagaries, and he ended in madness. Of him something more will be said in a succeeding chapter. The problem of urnindism, of feminine similisexualism so widely prevalent in France, enter into many stories of the day. Lesbianism is the staple subject of a school of Parisian tale-tellers, who deal with it in the crudest way that anything like literary diction allows.

In French heterosexualism there appears also far less