All what one knew about the count and the countess of X..., was that they got voluntarily separated after two years of marriage and broke with one accord a badly matched union. The count, one said, lived secluded at the end of Spain, in his patrimonial castle; the countess, after having stayed a few months in Andalusia, her homeland, had set her residence in Paris, where she lived in a little mansion of the Avenue de Messine, under a borrowed name that sounded like a challenge for the strong sex and like an invitation for the cute one, unless the only hazard had been its sponsor, what semt quite unlikely, and though one knew the true civil name of the lady, one referred to her only under the name she took on her cards: countess of Lesbos. The Countess of Lesbos of Edouard Demarchin is a classic of the French erotic literature of the beginning of the 20th century.