No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

her love for a favourite, pain at separation, grief when girls left to marry, nostalgia at remembering pleasures shared, jealousy about rivals. In one fragment, she wrote of a lover who outshone all the women of Sardis as the moon outshone the stars. In another, she invoked Aphrodite to help her, not break her heart with pain and sorrow. In a third, she described her feelings on seeing and hearing the woman she loved.

In classical Greece, no other woman poet achieved Sappho’s recognition. Fifth-century vases testified to her fame, her portrait was in the Acropolis at Athens, the Syracusans erected a statue of her in their town hall, the Alexandrians collected her work into nine books, she was read in schools up to the fourth century AD.

Natalie, Evalina Palmer and others in their circle allied Sappho to their modernist view in much the same way as James Joyce reclaimed Odysseus. Role models for lesbians were few. Sappho was evidence that such desires were time-honoured, that there had always been women who felt as they did, whose emotions were pure and lifestyles self-willed, not prescribed or dictated by men.

Natalie’s openness was contagious and gave courage to lesbians less bold than she. Those less confident to be true to themselves gravitated towards her and were emboldened by her candour. The pursuit of desire, love triangles, the pain of jealousy, infidelity and broken affairs became their interpretation of Sappho and a link to a classical culture.

This swell of lesbian visibility was from the ground up, a heartfelt movement, an opposition to exclusion, denial and insult. Natalie aspired to make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Unflinching, outspoken, unembarrassable, she did not hide behind euphemism, say what society might want to hear, or curry acceptance. Around her there formed a community of lesbians who could be who they were. Paris allowed such freedom.

Liane de Pougy

In spring 1899, Natalie was in Paris with her mother. She was twenty-three and glad to be rid of the ‘rigid protocol’ of Washington society. They shared a house in avenue Victor Hugo. Alice Barney enrolled for James Whistler’s course in portrait painting for women at the Académie Carmen in the Passage Stanislas, owned by Whistler’s principal life model Carmen Rossi, with whom Natalie had a fling. Natalie studied French classical poesy and Greek with a scholar and poet, Charles Brun, and wrote poems in French about love and her lovers.

She began another ‘living as the first of the arts’ relationship. It caused a dramatic rift between her and her father. Liane de Pougy was a famous Paris courtesan, who numbered Albert, Prince of Wales and Maurice de Rothschild among her clients. Courtesan was a more respectable word than prostitute for women who had sex with rich clients for a lot of money. Born Anne-Marie Chassaigne in 1870 in the Breton city of Rennes, she fled to Paris to escape her humble roots, miserable marriage and young son, and joined the salon of the Comtesse Valtesse de la Bigne. She took her professional name from a favoured client, the Comte de Pougy. Society columns of the 1890s wrote of her beauty, her jewels, and the company she kept. In payment for a stint, she might receive ‘a necklace of the white pearls I love worth one hundred thousand francs’. The scrimping days of Anne-Marie Chassaigne ended.

Liane de Pougy in 1902 © Bridgeman Images

To deflect unwanted attention from her father and protect her inheritance prospects, Natalie declared her engagement to an ersatz fiancé, Robert Cassatt, whose family had made their money in railroads. He agreed in writing to a ‘chaste and intellectual marriage’. Natalie made clear their arrangement was a societal and financial cover; she desired women, not men, and that would always be so. Cassatt said he desired women too, so they had that in common. Out with him one afternoon in an open landau in the Bois de Boulogne, they passed Liane de Pougy’s carriage in the Passage des Acacias. Natalie and Liane ‘exchanged long looks and half glances’.

Next morning, Natalie called with roses and cornflowers. Liane was in a blue silk bed. They soaked together in a perfumed bath and had sex on Liane’s polar bear rug.2 Liane praised Natalie’s white blonde hair, ‘like a moonbeam’, her blue eyes and ‘vicious white teeth’. In the evening they went to see Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet at her own theatre. Passers-by applauded Liane as she stepped from her carriage. Natalie compared Hamlet’s passivity to the subjugation of women. Men, she said, made laws for their own benefit. Her resolve was to revise these laws to favour women who love women. Her rejection of male orthodoxies was unequivocal: There was no God, the Bible was man’s fiction, an overprinted fable: ‘“God will punish you even to the third and fourth generation.” Let’s raise a glass of cool water to the health of the fifth generation.’

Natalie pursued Liane out of desire, but also declared a half-hearted feminist intention to save her from prostitution. She suggested to Cassatt that, when married, they adopt Liane to provide income for her too, so she could retire as a sex worker. Cassatt was not keen. Marrying for money and agreeing not to have sex with his wife was one thing. His wife having sex with his daughter who was seven years older than he was and a famous courtesan was a stretch too far.

Liane gave Natalie a silver and moonstone ring embossed with a bat, symbolizing rebirth, and inscribed with a message of love. It complemented Natalie’s anklet, commissioned from the jeweller René Lalique, of bats flying among diamond stars. They began a one-act play about Sappho, had fantasies about finding a ‘blessed little nook’ together, but until that happened, Liane explained,

I still need 800,000 francs before I can stop. Then I shall cable you: ‘Come take me’ We’ll really live. We’ll dream, think, love, write books.

They travelled to London together, booked a suite at the Hotel Cecil, hired a boat