bold enough to condemn his neighbor in his flesh and blood? every passion is good and great and normal since it exists.

For men like these, bums or poets, ushers or clerks, their daily activities in 1900 were, with few exceptions, almost identical with those of their counterparts today, but what a dıf ference there must be in psychological attitudes An understanding such as that shown by Charles-Louis Phi lippe was then exceptional, and rare

certainly very rare indeed were the middle-class homosexuals capable of judging their own particular nature in its true light as being not of moral order but of a biological and sociological one. 34 Now, to be exact, it is all the more difficult to form an accurate picture of such matters because the line of demarcation between certain sexual neuroses and this "normal" virile, healthy form of homosexuality which creates the attraction often felt by intellectuals for the working man, is often wavering and indistinct.35 M. de Charlus' inversion might just as easily have led him to a robust and masculine kind of love as to vice. Little things can make such differences. If only Jean Lorrain had not been addicted to ether, if only, instead of frequenting shadowy and questionable levels of society he had formed a lasting relationship with a colossus who might or might not wear underwear or an apple-green cardigan, far from con sidering him a neurotic invalid, we would consider him a "normal" homosexual. And who can say whether neuroticism plays a part in a case like that of the pianist Voyer who, the evening of the 18th of June, 1880, was surprised by the police in the Bois de Vincennes "resting his left hand on a cane, his right hand indecently on the trousers of an tilleryman?"36

ar-

This problem is particularly touchy when it becomes a matter of trying

to define in literature someone like Georges Eeckhoud. In Eskal Vigor, in Mes Communions, what contrasts there are On the one hand, the style is very "end of the century" al most the "artistic" style of Jean Lorrain or Huysmans, laden with adjectives, rare words, and is further burdened with a kind of Flemish heaviness, on the other hand, there is a marked taste for popular surroundings bordering, here, if not on anarchy, certainly on socialism There is a rather morbid attraction for bandits, thieves, assassins, and professional murderers. But there is no trace of the invert as in the case of Jean Lorrain there are no Jewels, no dyed hair, no ivory headed canes or silk stockings. The lawyer Zambelli, in the story entitled Le Sublime escarpe The Sublime Assassin is madly in love with a young thief who in the end, sacrifices his life for him but is, himself, possessed of irreproachable dignity

In the novelette entitled Appol et Brouscard, 38 we are witness to a reciprocal and marvelous passion between two bandits. The tale is redolent of Flemish taverns, fertile humid plains, unsavory neighborhoods, and is told with a romantic grandiloquence which at first glance appears very virile, but which is, on closer examination, found to be decidedly feminine and even somewhat puerile. The tawdry "advice to the love-lorn", the facile poetry about good bandits, noble outlaws and sublime assassins constitute, when all's said and done, the literature of a sentimental homosexual, and Gide is a hundred times more virile, despite his little Arabs.

But, after all, where does virility leave off, and where does effeminacy begin? But to answer this question would lead us rather for afield.

Colette relates in Ces Plaisirs a typical anecdote which, if I judge correctly from the allusion to handle-