Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.

Though legal plots are a common feature of the nineteenth-century European novel, the massive legal changes brought about by the French Revolution made law a uniquely important theme of French fiction, and changed the way novelists made use of it. In the early part of the century, Romantic novelists’ meditations on law, such as those of Mme de Staël, reflected their eighteenth-century intellectual inheritance, in attempting to understand if and how individual happiness and social duty could be reconciled by enlightened legal reform. Yet later novelists abandoned such utopian abstractions, to see in law the very epitome of the ‘realist’ view of the world that ultimately gave them their name: law, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac suggest, is about compromise with imperfect systems, the balancing of competing interests, and the operation of power—it is, in short, political. To learn the law, as so many nineteenth-century heroes set out to do, is thus to learn ‘the way of the world’. Finally, however, nineteenth-century novelists saw in the language of the law (and especially the Civil Code of 1804) a model for, and indeed a rival to, their own task: to build worlds in words, to speak ideas into being.