Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/463

 from Dresden. Among his "peculiarities", Baron C— is accustomed, when at his home, to wear female clothing almost exclusively. For rich gems, jewellery, perfumes, etc., he has been for a long time a lavish spender of money. His family-connection is an old and very aristocratic one in France, and the Baron himself is a person of superior education and breeding."

An amusing case, similar to the "Lillian Carver" one cited, occurred not long ago, where a young man disguised himself with perfect success as a young woman; for some six weeks filling a position as book-keeper in a factory in Allenstein, Germany. It originated in a bet. The young gentleman soon was surrounded by male adorers, being of exceptional elegance and beauty in his travesti. The surprise of his employer can be imagined when, on entering the bedroom of "Fräulein Louise" one morning, he found there, only a wonderfully good-looking, rosy youth of faultless masculinity, clad in a top-hat and handsome morning suit, pipe in hand, who smilingly greeted his employer—"Awfully sorry to give you inconvenience, but from to-day I am a man—again!" With which adieu "Fräulein Louise" betook herself to the railway-station, leaving half-a-dozen wounded hearts.

Two curious cases of the passion for women-attire, on the part of adult homosexuals, appear in Augustus of Saxe-Gotha (1772-1822) who lived much of his private life in gowns, laces, and jewels; received guests in them; had himself painted as a woman by portraitists of his capital and by foreign artists (the Duke's feminine beauty quite justifying such records ) and on his death left millions of money in debts—and enormous masses of women's habiliments, women's jewellery and women's wigs. This sovereign, a wit and satirist, was perhaps the first of aristocratic German homosexual authours in belles-lettres; by his novels "The Kyllenion: or A Year in Arcadia"