. She travelled much and at one time took a house at
Mitylene, the chief city of ancient Lesbos. She had a love of
solitude, hated publicity, and was devoted to her women friends,
especially to one whose early death about 1900 was the great
sorrow of Pauline Tarn's life. She is described as very
beautiful, very simple and sweet-natured, and highly accomplished
in many directions. She suffered, however, from nervous
overtension and incurable melancholy. Toward the close of her
life she was converted to Catholicism and died in 1909, at the
age of 32. She is buried in the cemetery at Passy. Her best verse
is by some considered among the finest in the French language.
(Charles Brun, "Pauline Tarn," _Notes and Queries_, 22 Aug.,
1914; the same writer, who knew her well, has also written a
pamphlet, _Renee Vivien_, Sansot, Paris, 1911.) Her chief volumes
of poems are _Etudes et Preludes_ (1901), _Cendres et Poussieres_
(1902), _Evocations_ (1903). A novel, _Une Femme M'Apparut_
(1904), is said to be to some extent autobiographical. "Renee
Vivien" also wrote a volume on Sappho with translations, and a
further volume of poems, _Les Kitharedes_, suggested by the
fragments which remain of the minor women poets of Greece,
followers of Sappho.

It is, moreover, noteworthy that a remarkably large proportion of the
cases in which homosexuality has led to crimes of violence, or otherwise
come under medico-legal observation, has been among women. It is well
know that the part taken by women generally in open criminality, and
especially in crimes of violence, is small as compared with men.[144] In
the homosexual field, as we might have anticipated, the conditions are to
some extent reversed. Inverted men, in whom a more or less feminine
temperament is so often found, are rarely impelled to acts of aggressive
violence, though they frequently commit suicide. Inverted women, who may
retain their feminine emotionality combined with some degree of infantile
impulsiveness and masculine energy, present a favorable soil for the seeds
of passional crime, under those conditions of jealousy and allied emotions
which must so often enter into the invert's life.

The first conspicuous example of this tendency in recent times is
the Memphis case (1892) in the United States. (Arthur Macdonald,
"Observation de Sexualite Pathologique Feminine," _Archives
d'A