If the hermaphrodite became increasingly visible in so many different forms at the end of the nineteenth century, it was no doubt because its dual and ambivalent nature could not be confined by the paradigm of the sexes and eluded all attempts at categorization. It was a category embracing all kinds of hybrid people, the homosexuals as well as the transvestites. The hermaphrodite lost its other worldly status and was recognized as the offspring of a society adrift, the result of the disintegration of moral values and the loss of clearly defined norms of sexual behavior and threats that seemed omnipresent at the time. Thus, the hermaphrodite was seen as “more than a woman … [but] still not quite a man,” in the words of Jean Lorrain. The lesbian rushed into this in-between position and introduced the reign of the unnatural. Distancing itself from the spirit of the Enlightenment and the imagination of the Romantics, the Decadent movement substituted the traditional opposition of “nature versus culture” with “natural versus unnatural,” which became the symbol of a flawed Creation.