Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/359

 was bathed in a purple-red glow, as if splashed over with the blood of wars."

A distinctly homosexual quality, chiefly pederastic and referring to very youthful ephebi, recurs in the novels, and verse of Count Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen—a sonnet by whom will be cited in course of this chapter. The most artistic of Fersen's tales is met in "Une Jeunesse". It is a simple and graceful sketch of the passion of Robert Jélaine, a young French painter—sensual and prematurely disillusioned but not wholly embittered—for a Sicilian youth, Nino, with a head "like that of the David of Verocchio." The boy is living with his grandmother, at Taormina. Nino has inherited homosexuality, though he does not know it. But the instinct, and consequent incidents, bring his sudden separation from Jélaine. The lad is led to undertake in Verona, a noviciate which is to lead him to the priesthood; for which he has obviously no vocation. He is expelled from the seminary, partly because of an intercepted letter from Jélaine (the character of which is too explicit for doubt) and partly because of the lad's suddenly awakened heterosexuality, his love for a young girl in whose society he has been thrown in his holiday-hours. The end of the talc is not a conclusion. Jélaine finds Nino, in his disgrace, sitting alone at night, in the half-ruined Amphitheater in Verona. His friend implores him, now that he is free and so utterly alone in the world, to return to him. But Nino refuses; be it in sexual bewilderment, fear, conviction that it would be an error,—or vaguer prescience?—and the two part. This final scene is as follows:

… "At last after a long and slow climb, arriving at the top of the ancient tabellium,—like some gigantic cup turned upside down into which stars were raining—Nino distinguished a circle relatively light … Then suddenly the moon leaped out from the torn robe