Georges Herelle was known as the French translator of the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio and as a collector of Pastoral Basques. He also became one of the first great scientists, a passionate researcher and archivist of sexual inversion. At seventeen, upon arrival at the College Sainte-Barbe in Paris, he met Paul Bourget, the future academician, and fell in love with him. Their correspondence as well as the correspondence with their gay friends (archived by Herelle with all sorts of documents related to his investigation of sexual inversion: postcards, brochures, photographs, etc.) gives privileged access to social and literary circles of homosexuals at the end of the Second Empire.