from paris with love
renée vivien, natalie clifford barney, love and poetry in the belle époque
Vivien offers a terrible temptation for any woman translator: to see herself not only as a literary successor but also as a lover, in the most literal sense of the word, of Renée Vivien. It was a temptation I did not resist. Sometimes, when verses and stanzas came particularly easily, I would imagine that it was Vivien herself who was composing through my hands—that I was hearing her voice in my mind—as though I were some sort of Spiritualist medium. The vocabulary errors in my early drafts, which I have since corrected, would suggest a deadly silence on Vivien's part. (But then, she always was reserved.)
—samantha pious, translator of crown of violets
I have held Renée Vivien in my arms at times, and in some strange way she has been a part of my own expiation. Some intermingling of time and space, an erotic continuum that joins our lives to each other—erotic. [...] To understand Vivien and our relationship to the whole feminine lineage, we must see eroticism not just in its limited sexual sense, but in a more expansive way that includes the full range of love.
—sandia belgrade, translator of at the sweet hour of hand in hand
I fell in love with renée vivien in march of 2019
the previous winter, for various strange reasons, I'd become obsessed with the french decadents. in short, I was bored with software and had decided to become a voluptuary. I'd had a phase as a hedonist, years earlier, drinking five nights a week, parties and drugs and indie shows in basements and warehouses. but this time I wanted to learn to appreciate "finer things"
I learned to cook and make cocktails, I traded jeans and sneakers for slacks and dress shoes. I indulged in various other ways. and, looking for some intellectual, or at least aesthetic, underpinning, I read. I worked through the decadents, scouring the genre, poetry and fiction, whatever I could find. and then, after I came out the other side, I found renée
renée vivien, thrilling yet tragic, intermingling love and death with the passion of isolde, writing with uncommon grace in a style already decades out of fashion. a direct heir to baudelaire, she rises above him, because while he wields his lurid subject matter as a weapon, she presses it tenderly to her breast. "une charogne" offers an ode to a corpse as a way of making a statement. "par-delà la mort persiste le désir" is simply in love with one
renée bathes in suffering and longs for the grave, but also she loves with great ardor. she is delicate and tender, though not always subtle. the last of the symbolists, a translator and priestess of sappho, and the first great lesbian poet to follow her
in march, I read her poetry. in april, I read her novella. in may, I sat alone at a bar, trapped in a doomed romance, poring over her verses, searching for the poem that would guide me through it. in desperation, I told the bartender everything and asked her what to do. she said that she would leave
Your hair is a rain
Of gold and perfume on my hands.
You lead me along paths
Where perversity is bored.I have chosen, to crown your brow,
The moonstone and the opal,
Aconite and digitalis,
And the black iris of a deep lake.The pleasure of hearing the drops
Of your blood beading on the flowers!...
The lilies have lost their pallor
And all the roads are becoming crimson...
—renée
it's impossible to talk about renée vivien without talking about natalie clifford barney. when I first discovered them, read the stories they told about each other, I found myself transported by the tragedy of their love. a star-crossed affair. passionate, brief, not meant to last. stricken with pain throughout
when together, renée suffered terribly from natalie's aloof manner and many infidelities. it was renée's first love, and she wanted it to be transcendent, while natalie was an accomplished seductress with a wandering heart. renée was also torn between her obsession with natalie and her chaste devotion to her childhood friend, violet shilleto. when violet died, neglected, in the south of france, renée recoiled with horror from her selfishness and swore to never see natalie again
once parted, natalie desperately tried to win her back, and to save her from the malign influence of a sinister older woman who had become her keeper and jailor. scheme after scheme was thwarted, until finally natalie met her alone, at bayreuth. the two resolved to flee from society and make a new life, on the island of lesbos, and fulfill their old dream of reviving the cult of sappho and building a refuge for a new generation of lesbian poets. they took the orient express to constantinople, sailed to mytilene, and settled into their bliss. but fate intervened to separate them again, and after this idyll, they would never reunite
from that point forward, renée entered terminal decline. she shut herself up in her apartment in paris, hardly eating, drinking incessantly, abusing drugs, and living at the mercy of a cruel, unseen mistress. she wasted away, and soon, she died, barely past the age of 30
the brilliant poet left one final work: the poem that adorns her tombstone
Here is the gate through which I leave...
Oh my roses and my thorns!
What matter now days gone by?
I sleep and dream of things divine...Herein lies my ravished soul,
It is peaceful, sleeping now
Having for the love of Death
Forgiven the bitter crime of Life.
the drama of their lives, the pain they endured, enchanted me. suffering in love, I found their story to be inspiring, unreal, impossibly vivid. alas, in many ways it was
while politicians and lawyers lie for gain, writers and poets lie for beauty, and that makes them the more dangerous. the arc of natalie and renée's love affair is in essence true. the breakup and reunion, the travels, the other women, the untimely death. but both of them were wrapped up in their own worlds, and they massaged their words to accord with their sense of how things ought to be
but the more I read about natalie and renée, the better I felt like I understood
You see, I am of the age when the maiden gives her hand
To the man her weakness seeks out and fears
And I have not chosen a traveling companion
Because you appeared at a bend in the road.
I felt the sweetness and the fear
Of your first kiss on my silent lips
I hear lyres break under your feet.With what kisses can I charm your languorous soul...
What loving rhythms, what passionate poems
are worthy to honour her whose beauty
wears its Desire upon its forehead like a diadem?...Here is the night of love so long promised
In the shadows I see you grow divinely pale.
—renée, to natalie
No longer trying to please or even move you,
Let me draw near you, more virginal
Than the snow: teach me your impartial peace,
Destroy my will and my power.I want to hide my eyes, sadder than the evening,
From your eyes, forget everything save the small oval
Of your face and, with my forehead on your soft breasts,
Sob out my hopeless tears.
—natalie, to renée
natalie and renée were born one year and one ocean apart, in 1876 and 1877, in dayton ohio and london england. both were born wealthy, with the unusual education, mobility, and independence such status entailed at that time. and as they came of age, both found themselves irresistibly drawn to the city of paris. they met in 1899 and quickly began a brief but intense romance that would define them for the rest of their lives
natalie recalls in her memoirs that she found herself initially unimpressed by the "charming but banal" renée. natalie was in the midst of her own turbulent affair with the most famous courtesan in france, liane de pougy, and spent most of the night reading and rereading a letter from her which simultaneously celebrated the beauty of their love, while assuring her they'd never meet again
for renée, however, it was love at first sight: "The thrill which went through me when my eyes met hers of mortal steel, those eyes sharp and blue as a blade. I had the strange feeling that this woman was telling me my destiny, that her face was the formidable face of my future."
natalie's interest would awaken later in the evening, as they drove through the bois and violet encouraged renée to read one of her poems:
Tonight I will sleep soundly and long.
Draw the heavy curtains round, keep the doors closed,
Do not let the sun penetrate these precincts.
Cast around my shoulders the evening drenched with rose.
Lay down those funereal flowers whose scent so haunts me
On the white cover of my deep pillow.
Lay them in my hands, on my heart, my forehead
Those pale flowers which seem like warm wax.And I will murmur softly, "Nothing of me remains.
My soul is at last at rest. Have pity on it!
Let it rest in peace for all eternity."
Tonight I will sleep a death most beautiful.
natalie had hoped to "save" de pougy from her lifestyle, at the mercy of vile men for her very survival, despite her annoyed protestations that she did not need saving and was at no one's mercy but her own. so when natalie heard renée's poem, she thought she had found a new damsel:
I was taken by this sad poem haunted by the desire for death. Having failed in the mission I had set myself with such fervor [...] I took an interest in this young woman with such a gift for poetry. How could I awaken her interest in life? In my life?
in most ways, they could not have been less alike. as suzanne rodriguez puts it in wild heart:
[Renée] and Natalie were a mismatched love affair from the start, their individual beliefs and outlooks largely antagonistic. Where Natalie celebrated life, [Renée] was drawn to death. Natalie was gregarious, while [Renée] preferred solitude. Natalie's thought processes tended to be detached and analytical; [Renée]'s were ruled by emotion. For [Renée], nothing was more important than writing poetry, while Natalie wanted her life itself to be her greatest poem. Natalie loved her body, using it to participate in sports and enjoy sex; [Renée]'s lifelong abuse of her body, via drugs, alcohol, and anorexia, would result in a very early death.
if their lifestyles and personal philosophies didn't clash enough, the greatest wedge between them would be their attitudes toward love
renée longed for an affair that was all-consuming, a poetical union of two souls. she wanted a rapturous love, one that would transfigure her, an antidote to her love of death
natalie, by contrast, lived for the passion and heat of the moment. she loved the chase, loved the hunt. she loved the moment of ecstasy a lover felt under her practiced fingers. but more than merely lustful, natalie saw the act as a portal to another world: through sex, she could access her lover's soul
they did have things in common. for one, poetry, and another, unapologetic love of women. as gayle rubin puts it, "At a time when Krafft-Ebing classified homosexuality as a degenerative disease, Vivien and Barney considered it a thrilling distinction. They responded to anti-homosexual disdain with insolent extremism."
natalie finds a rather different commonality: "I belonged to everyone, she belonged to no one. We considered ourselves quite different, and yet in our loneliness were alike."
"Do you believe she was as irresistible as they say?"
"She was as irresistible as all who have obeyed their own nature. She is as irresistible as Destiny itself."
"Why did she only really love women?"
"Because only women are complex enough to attract her, fleeting enough to hold her. Only they can offer her all the ecstasy, all the torment... She loses us in ourselves, finds us again in others. I believe she is more faithful in her inconstancy than others in their fidelity."
Leaning on my shoulder to read the book with me, Renée murmured in my ear: "That Sappho there is you."
—natalie
it feels common, almost quaint, these days to hear people conceptualize their lives as fictions. they'll say, with proper ironic detachment, they're on "arcs" or have "sidequests." they'll debate what it means to behave as a "protagonist," not just thinking of acting with more agency, but considering how they appear to an audience, imagining how they fit into the storyline of the world
how familiar natalie and renée seem in this regard! both understood perfectly the back-and-forth of presenting an aesthetic of life on the page while also living with an aestheticism to merit the depiction. natalie's life was her art, and she endeavored to live with the beauty and power that her writing could never quite capture. and renée lived as if trapped in her art, wracked by the excesses of feeling her words convey, experiencing her relationships as another form of poetry
in this way, despite their many differences, natalie and renée were made for each other. nowhere is this clearer, or at least stated more plainly, than in renée's novella, une femme m'apparut
renée wrote her first version of the book in 1904, after her breakup with natalie but before the excursion to mytilene. in it, she fictionalizes the start of their relationship, their trip to america, the death of violet, and her escape into the arms of another. for the text, she cleaves herself into two characters: an unnamed narrator, weak to physical desire and unrequited love, a mild and timid girl who exists at the mercy of those around her. and san giovanni, the heroic androgyne, a poet who lounges in graveyards and waxes lyrical on higher things, utterly uninterested in sex or affairs of the heart
the narrator is the pitiful girl that renée sees herself as, and san giovanni is the noble poet she wishes she could become, if only she could give up her earthly attachments. and vally, the stand-in for natalie, is a heartless woman, cold and unsparing. vally is so unlike the real natalie that the novella cannot truly be called a roman à clef. it doesn't fictionalize reality so much as it narrativizes a conflict within renée's heart
the narrator expresses the depths of her love for the impassive vally; vally bitterly laments that she herself feels nothing. vally envies the narrator, because while vally chases pleasure that leaves her cold, the narrator is capable of experiencing transcendence. the narrator begs forgiveness for her "exacting Christian fidelity, against which all her instincts of a young maenad rebelled." above all, the narrator blames herself for vally's lack of love, feeling that if she had been able to transmogrify her spirit, vally would have never strayed
as vally says:
I wanted so much to love you! I should really be pitied for being incapable of a unique and sincere passion. [...] You did me a grave wrong—you could not satisfy the Lover in me, that creature of ruse and cruelty, a creature of flesh who still craved the Impossible. The Impossible has never been granted her, and the craving has been killed by anger and shame and all. It is quite dead today.
how I feel for renée! as art, her novella is far inferior to her poetry, and as portraiture, it bears no relation to its subjects. but as the confession of a shattered heart, it is terribly painful
natalie was renée's first amour and her first true love. it haunts her that she couldn't satisfy natalie, though in truth, no one could restrain her from chasing who she wanted. and after, after renée left, when she couldn't bear the infidelities any longer, she penned this story, in which she wrestled with the ways that she failed, tried to make sense of how it was her fault
but, perhaps, in some ways it was. and in others, it was no one's. the line of how vally "craved the Impossible" strikes me, because it parallels a line from the poem that renée wrote about their first coupling:
And with a spirit thirsting for eternity, for the impossible,
For the infinite, I wanted to broadly modulate
A hymn of magic and wonder.
But the stanza rose stammering and difficult,
Naive reflection, childish echo, staggered flight,
Towards your Divinity.
but while renée struggled to articulate the grandeur she experienced that night, natalie found herself frustrated by her partner's lack of more earthly desire:
With all my experience, I could do little to overcome her physical inertia. Her soul alone vibrated passionately to our union. As for my caresses, she murmured: 'Yes, it's very gentle, continue,' and I continued indefinitely without ever unveiling the woman who slept within the virgin.
natalie, who had always expressed her love in the physical, found she "had the sad perspective of either becoming unfaithful to Renée or of renouncing a major part of myself"
at least, that's what she remembers, writing her memoirs decades later. just as she remembers how renée, on their trip to america, "discovered an old graveyard and the haunting death of Violette had kept her there, [falling] once again victim to that melancholy in which only death seemed an attractive prospect." but violet would not yet die for another six months
this is the way they fit perfectly, these two lovers of stories! natalie, the amazon, the page. she yearned to save renée's soul from its impossible despair, just as renée yearned to transcend the limits of this fetid earth. and so, after the young poet's death, natalie would serve as the ideal bard. she honed renée's legend to a razor point, and in so doing, burnished her own narrative as the knight of courtly romance, who put everything into saving her beloved
and this is where renée's supposed captor, the baronne hélène van zuylen, comes in. in her schemes to take renée back, natalie thinks of herself as mounting a rescue, when in fact renée was quite happy. though her love for the baronne had none of the passion she had for natalie, it had none of the pain either. she had a comfortable life with a loyal partner, had recently published a new book of poetry, and by all accounts was content. whereas to natalie, this inconvenient baronne "had evidently made a conquest of Renée, but how? Certainly not by her physical charms." she claims to have been willing to let her be, if only she knew she was happy, yet wonders if "her flight from me [betrayed] weakness or only a constraint imposed from outside?"
neither was renée, after having her heart broken by natalie, so faithful as she had expected of her golden-haired lover. she absconded with natalie in secret to mytilene, covering her tracks all the way. and she had other lovers besides. on that very trip, she made time in constantinople for a tryst with the wife of a turkish diplomat, even visiting her in the harem. this, and renée's brief affair with their mutual friend olive custance, natalie omits from her tale. though she certainly knew: when renée came to her distraught over having discovered her "faithful" baronne's infidelity, natalie chided, "Really, Renée, do you have the right to be so indignant?"
meanwhile, in public, natalie praises renée after their final parting because the pain of it finally forced her into greatness:
Thanks to this "wretched life" and the joy which eluded her, she became what she always wanted to be: a great poet. As I read la Vénus des Aveugles and Aux heures des mains jointes, I noticed how much stronger her poems had become. There were no more "perfumed pallors" and other insipidities trailing along. They were no longer languorous but heavy with images from her life, reflecting the cruelty of her existence against which she had at first rebelled, then borne with resignation and grandeur.
the two women were coauthors of the myth of renée vivien, the blameless victim of selfish lovers, the poet whose pain was too much for this earth. as natalie says herself, "What one describes in print is not who one is, but who one would like to be." they may have been too successful, because renée's life has come to outshine her work
on the other hand, it's for them to tell their story as they please. others have never been so kind and careful. the french public who buried them treated them as a parable on the dangers of a dissolute lifestyle. the american feminists who revived them swept their personal lives under the rug in service to a vision of empowered and non-oppressive womanhood
let them tell their story, the way they want it. it at least reflects how they hoped to be remembered. and yet, underneath the veneer of fiction, I want most of all to know the women themselves
as it turns out, renée learned to embrace the physical passions she'd previously seemed to scorn in favor of the spiritual realm. natalie makes no mention of their happy dalliances in her memoirs, but her private letters reveal that on mytilene:
In bed the first night, [Renée] responded at long last to Natalie's caresses. In fact, the immensity of her passion so overwhelmed Natalie with happiness that she found herself smothering a "cry of victory triumphant." She had never imagined, she later wrote, that their bodies and souls could unite so deeply.
it would seem that renée's chaste vision of love could have been more a matter of fear and hesitancy than some deep abiding gnostic detachment
but how wonderful! surely this is so much better than the myth
in one, she's an ideal, born to be poetry incarnate. not made for this world, and all too eager to depart it
in the other, she's a shy, frightened girl, who retreats into her heart when the love of her life enters her bed. she feels longing, but not lust. her body doesn't respond to the skilled touch of a woman who only wants to give her pleasure. but years later, they run off together on a whim to live in conjugal bliss on the island of their beloved tenth muse. and then, renée is finally ready to let go, to be present, bodily, in the moment of love
how could you prefer a static narrative to such an image of growth, development, and contradiction! I felt so happy for renée, so thrilled, when I read, in contrast to her myth, she had attained satisfaction. are not life and love so grand?
Prolong the night, Goddess who sets us aflame!
Hold back from us the golden-sandalled dawn!
Already on the sea the first faint gleam
Of day is coming on.Sleeping under your veils, protect us yet,
Having forgotten the cruelty day may give!
The wine of darkness, wine of the stars let
Overwhelm us with love!Since no one knows what dawn will come,
Bearing the dismal future with its sorrows
In its hands, we tremble at full day, our dream
Fears all tomorrows.Oh! keeping our hands on our still-closed eyes,
Let us vainly recall the joys that take flight!
Goddess who delights in the ruin of the rose,
Prolong the night!
nevertheless, despite her pleasures, death was always beside her. her living passions don't erase the demise she herself worked for and earned. her alchoholism progressed to the point of infirmity; near the end, she was seen walking with a cane, at the age of 32. when she died, she weighed a scant 70 pounds
many of her friends considered it a slow suicide, but natalie objected, in line with the myth:
More than any other, she was the priestess of death, and death was her last major work, for that amorous virgin died in accord with herself... It wasn't a suicide: those who love life kill themselves; those who love death allow themselves to die... All her life had been an evolution toward that final and undeniable hope.
How pale is all reality next to the mere dream of you; my sweetest sunlit desire grows and is drowned and refound and lost again in the vibrating possibilities I feel in the looks of your half-closed eyes, and it is no longer my tongue but my soul that caresses you... ah, the warmness of being so together. I would have flame born of it—flame that is a sort of light! How it burns me with joy when I kiss you.
—natalie, to eva palmer
She came to me because her life was broken, and nothing mattered much.
They told me she was unhappy, she told me nothing, she only laughed.
I understood her because she is beautiful, and because I always understand beautiful things.
—natalie, on élisabeth de gramont
Unable to live either with or without her, I do not know what I found more painful: our endangered meetings, our separations or our attempts at fidelity. Like so many other lovers, we had not finished with those "bitter farewells which do not last" and those exhilarating but short-lived reconciliations.
—natalie, on renée
and then, there's the matter of natalie and her fickle heart. on the surface, as she would often claim, natalie was simply a free-spirited pagan, gloriously out of step with the times. radclyffe hall depicts her as "no mere libertine in love's garden, but rather a creature born out of her epoch, a pagan chained to an age that was Christian." renée's narrator calls her her "pagan Priestess" and laments her "pagan joy found outlet in numerous love affairs." natalie approved of this characterization, saying that despite the "false mysticism which seemed to haunt her, in a sudden moment of lucidity, she recognized my restful pagan soul"
in some sense it was surely true, for natalie was never bound by the strictures of christian morality. she was a source of scandal as early as 1900, when she published a collection of poems to various female lovers under her own name. the following year, her depiction as "flossie" in liane de pougy's idylle saphique sealed her social fate. while paris was somewhat tolerant, only her boundless charm saved her from social ostracism in washington dc, where she had to regularly visit at her father's behest as a member of american high society
natalie, for her part, loved the notoriety. but in private correspondence, she hinted at the hurt she felt from those who turned their back on her. "I cannot say how sorry I feel for the intensely vulnerable," she wrote of lord alfred douglas, still persona non grata a decade after the oscar wilde scandal. "I have been tormented in so many little ways myself that my whole heart goes out to them." it is very easy to imagine how she may have exulted in her disrepute to prevent it from being wielded against her
beneath her lively paganism, she was less an unequivocal proponent of free love, and more a libertine who did as she pleased. for one, she found it difficult to tolerate when her lovers found loves of their own. she could be jealous, bitter, and controlling, if she felt she was losing her place in a woman's heart. one long-suffering companion was her childhood friend eva palmer, a girl to which natalie felt she had a particularly strong claim
Natalie, Eva, and Baby H. were in Bayreuth for the yearly festival. Out motoring one afternoon in the princess's Mercedes, they discovered a small pond buried in the woods, removed their clothing, and jumped in. Later, lazing about in the altogether, the usually blasé Natalie was shocked to see a tiny heart tattooed on Eva's body. Peering closely, she realized that it bore the initials B.B. "That enterprising Princess had seduced her!" Natalie fumed. Afterward, when they were alone, she berated Eva so ceaselessly that she ended up having the tattoo painfully removed "to prove to me that I alone had rights to her body."
the converse to her jealous tendency, however, was she loved the chase, both the thrill of a new conquest and the triumph of winning back a lover who'd escaped. when she was with renée, she strayed, and treated the girl with some indifference. but once she left and firmly stated she would not be coming back, natalie could not resist pursuing her
writing to a friend about an incident in which renée literally fled from her by automobile, natalie quotes robert browning: "I know how much I love her / I know it now I've lost her." as one of her characters in a dialogue admits, pursuing a wayward lover, "because she rejects me, I desire her even more." per rodriguez, "The lines sum up Natalie's unresolvable attitude about love, which was guaranteed to frustrate and keep her searching forever: she only desired what she didn't have; what she had, she didn't want."
natalie thought nothing of involving her lovers in her attempts to win back renée, or to win new conquests. natalie roped eva into several schemes, where eva would go to the theater with renée, and then natalie would take her seat. she also had her at her beck and call during a fresh love affair with lucie delarue-mardrus; and once lucie was obsessed with her, natalie sent her new lover to beg for renée back too, knowing how much renée admired lucie's poetry
in the beginning of their affair, lucie wrote, "I think of you every second. I live for the idea of seeing you again." soon, it became, "My joy and my pain / My death and my life / My blond bitch!" and by the end, "I will attack you / I will cripple you! / The beautiful and brief light / Made by a blade."
natalie was preoccupied with the concept of the love triangle:
Natalie was happiest when positioned between two loves—one in the midst of a painful and reluctant departure, the other making a joyous entry onto the scene. For decades, a running joke among NCB's friends referred to the incoming lover as the "nouvelle amoureuse" (the one who is newly in love), while the latest cuckold became the "nouvelle malheureuse" (the one who is newly unhappy). When Lang asked Natalie whether she cared that one of the two always suffered, she shrugged her shoulders. "She didn't care," Lang acknowledged.
so it's hard to say that natalie was the free-spirited pagan she presented herself as. she was, in some ways, but in others she wasn't. but also, in some ways, she was the self-centered cad, in others she wasn't. the key to understanding this conflict in her personality, I believe, is her affair with liane de pougy
when natalie first spotted liane, she knew she wanted her, and she pulled out all the stops to win her. she sent flowers daily, with suggestive notes such as "from a stranger...?" she watched the woman as she rode through the bois, knowing she had a client at the time, patiently waiting for him to return to his home country. she commissioned a page costume, and once the time was right, called upon the grand horizontal at home
as rodriguez describes, from de pougy's idylle saphique:
Flossie, ecstatic, sweeps off her cloak to reveal her Renaissance costume, announces that she has been sent by Sappho, and falls to her knees at the courtesan's feet.
Nhine is delighted by the young woman's audacity. "How did you dare to come here like this?" she asks, running her fingers through the stranger's blond hair. "Weren't you afraid? Your family, your reputation, not to mention me—I might have received you quite badly.. perhaps I don't share your tastes and your ideas."
"I'll convert you!" the confident Flossie replies, adding: "I'm not asking anything except to love... adore... admire. Nothing else, my Nhinon, than to be accepted as your Page, your fervent little Page of love."
natalie and de pougy collaborated on the book together, although natalie felt her image suffered some under the fictional gloss. she complained that while the facts were more or less in order, she disliked the tone of "the innocent courtesan swept away and seduced little by little by the vicious young foreigner." she in fact had much higher aspirations than her lover gave her credit for: "I wanted to seduce not her body, already too monopolized, but her soul, which had been largely ignored."
natalie wrote her own version of events, in which she is not an eager and worshipful seductress, but an ardent advocate for de pougy's freedom. the book, according to rodriguez, is "enthusiastic and written with an innocence that Natalie will never again exhibit on paper." natalie would go on to be famous for her razor wit and uncrackable facade, but here, she was just a young and naive girl in love
natalie objected from the start to de pougy's life as a courtesan, pledging to free her from her shackles. at one point, she even planned a marriage of convenience that would grant her sufficient resources to provide for her lover's lavish tastes in retirement. de pougy, however was unamused: "My life is freely chosen," she said, "and what's more, it pleases me!"
still, their romance was rich and lusty. they spent such long stretches together that de pougy's friends warned she would have to take clients before she lost her prestige as the queen of the demimonde. as a compromise, natalie had her swear that, whatever she did with men, she wouldn't give herself to any other woman. de pougy agreed. they exchanged rings of devotion; the one on natalie's finger bore the engraving "I am so happy that you suffer from understanding and loving me"
it would be a portent. it was not long before de pougy broke her vow:
One night at an embassy ball Natalie learned from a friend, the Marquis R.C., that she had just unknowingly danced with Liane's protector. When she asked why he wasn't in Lugano with Liane, she received shocking news: the protector and his wife were both having an affair with de Pougy, and it was the wife's turn to have the courtesan to herself. Tears sprang to Natalie's eyes over Liane's broken promise not to touch another woman. The marquis whispered, not unkindly: "You attach entirely too much importance to this."
natalie's father came to paris, which made it more difficult for her to liase with her lover, but they found time for many "stolen moments of bliss." they spent weeks on vacation together, natalie sneaking around her parents and minders via a wide variety of improbable ruses. an especially memorable night, natalie dressed as sailor, rented a rowboat, and serenaded her lover with american shanties until they found a secluded cove to enjoy together. "The night sky was rich with stars; Natalie's soul was filled with joy. Years later she remembered feeling that it wasn't possible to survive such ecstasy."
but de pougy had to leave to take a new client, and they fought bitterly over her profession once more. as natalie's attempts to "rescue" her became more desperate and more possessive, de pougy shifted from annoyance to mockery and scorn. rumors spread that the queen of sex was neglecting her duties for some young american woman, and de pougy told her flat out, "Everyone tells me to let you go. Everyone." sick of her page of love, de pougy resolved to treat her with as much cruelty as she could unleash:
"I was unforgivable," [de Pougy] recalled years later. "One day I... went into a bedroom with Valtesse, locked the door and refused her nothing, highly amused at the thought of Flossie speculating and suffering on the other side of the door." Another time, according to Natalie, Liane brought her to a bordello and made her watch while she made love to one of the young female prostitutes. "That debauch without joy or beauty sickened me," Natalie wrote.
When they came together now there was no talk of souls and higher purpose. Sex, punishing arguments, cruel remarks, and humiliation dominated the repertoire. Each time seemed certain to be the last. But, as Natalie observed, they weren't yet there. One day they'd end the relationship forever; the next they came back together with violent passion. In their writings, both used the same lines by Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren to explain their obsession:
We are exhausted, we revive, we devour one another
And we kill each other, and we complain
And we hate it this way—but still we attract each other
and then, like that, de pougy vanished. she sent natalie a letter months later, ending their relationship. then, after some weeks, she wrote again, inviting her to spend the new year with her. natalie waited all night for her carriage, and when it never came, she called on de pougy, in case she forgot. but de pougy was out with a client
Sick, Natalie glanced around the foyer. "What are all these trunks doing here?" she asked.
"Madame hasn't told you, Mademoiselle? She and the baron leave tomorrow for Monte Carlo." Catching sight of Natalie's expression, the sympathetic maid added: "Poor Mademoiselle!"
The humiliation of the moment lingered forever. "Condolences from a chambermaid!" Natalie fumed in Mémoires secrets. "It was too much. I fled..."
this was, perhaps, the end of her innocence
I find it easy to relate to natalie, easier than I do to renée. I share natalie's hunger for life, her easygoing demeanor, her love of pleasure and enjoyment of fine company. but in this way, I relate most of all: the feeling of, having been hurt, resolving, with fire and bitterness, to never be hurt again
in truth, natalie wasn't just the free-spirited pagan. nor was she just the domineering lover. she wasn't just the selfless hostess, nor the ardent defender of her freedom and pride. nor the heartbroken girl, realizing at the doorstep of her impassive mistress that the woman cared nothing for her at all
she was all of those things, and none. she was simply, beautifully, human
For I would dance to make you smile, and sing
Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played...
And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid
'Twixt maid and maid...
—olive custance, to natalie
in the end, the fire and bitterness is an adolescent impulse. far from strength, it's a defensive posture, and when on the defense, one dares not. growth means exposing yourself to the possibility of hurt because you have the strength to accept the consequences of your daring. it's something I had to grow into. I think natalie did too
at the end of 1908, she moved from her villa in neuilly to the home that she'd occupy for the rest of her life, at 20 rue jacob. in her memoirs, she claims she hoped renée would visit a home that had no bad memories. elsewhere, she said she moved in an attempt to move on from her, or else to signal a break with the customs of her early youth. whatever the reason, the move marked the close of one chapter, and the opening of another. and before she even began to settle in, renée had died
natalie never gave up her flirtations and affairs, too core to her character, but her relationships were never again so turbulent, nor so short. she met élisabeth de gramont in 1910, and romaine brooks in 1915, and would stay with both women for many decades. they tolerated her dalliances, and she learned to demonstrate her fidelity in her own way, giving up her pattern of the "newly in love" and "newly unhappy" in favor of stable relationships alongside less serious flings
world war i came and went, and on the other side, paris would remain the global center of art and literature. the belle époque gave way to the années folles, and 20 rue jacob would become a famous address on par with 27 rue de fleurus: the salons of natalie barney and gertrude stein. when natalie moved to the 6th arrondissement in 1908, her friends couldn't understand why she would retreat to such a dusty and unfashionable area. but by the 1920s, the left bank would be the beating heart of modernism, and natalie's salon would be one of its major pulse points
in a way, her salon fulfilled the dream she shared with renée, two decades prior, of a school on lesbos, in imitation of sappho. her salon served, for all the allied nations, from the end of the first war until the fall of france, as the nexus of lesbian art, culture, and social life. all passed through her halls, and many her bed, and many careers were made, poems inspired, and loves forged. renée once murmured, "that sappho there is you," and it was, it was
as natalie wrote, near the end of her life: "If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem. I looked to life, I demanded of life the fullest expression of myself." natalie's life was her masterwork, as true a work as renée's poetry, and no one can say she didn't live it well
but the salon was the work of both. conceived in paris, attempted in mytilene. they built it together, the two of them. hand in hand, twixt maid and maid
Let us forget the days of anger and the days of reason and all that separates your hand from my loving hand. Was it you who wrote, "I would exchange the whole of human existence for one hour," and would you dare face the "divine peril" of your songs?
Have you put all your courage, all your poetry into your poems that so little is left for your life? The evening stretches toward you, I am the evening at your window... close your eyes... let me love you. No action is stranger than that of the night. Go mad with me, for madness is the wisdom of the shadows.
—natalie, to renée
You have been my inspiration. You showed me my true path—I found myself through you, came to know myself. You brought me strange flowers that I hadn't known, songs that I never would have heard, kisses that I never would have plucked. My thoughts and everything I write reflects all that.
—renée, to natalie
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
—sappho
