The history of female homosexuality is rooted in its representations and was shaped by various discourses that surrounded it in the late ninenteenth century.One cannot ignore them when studying the birth of a lesbian culture, harder to decipher than the gay culture. In the 1880’s, Paris became the Mecqua of sapphism, where many bars, brasseries, cheap restaurants and other public places, were more or less dedicated to a lesbian clientele,whereas homosexuals women used to meet privately before. This dynamic sub-culture was acknowledged by lots of books and articles as well as paintings and press illustrations. Even though those documents were partly infused with fantasy, they provide precious and detailed evidence of the way the lesbian Paris looked like.They tell us that, for the first time, the lesbian stopped being totally invisible: she walked in the street, braved the crowd, behaved and dressed in a certain way,and doing so helped a lesbian community to slowly emerge.