Today is the birthday of the Modernist author, sculptor and music patron Élisabeth de Gramont, also known by her married title, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. Although she never liked her violent husband and scandalized high society by leaving him for a woman in 1912 (and then divorcing him eight years later), the alliterative duchy suited her clear intellect and her thunderous, high-minded pursuit of truth, social justice and personal pleasure…not always in that order. She was known socially as “Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre” most of her life but took back her maiden name for publication, performance and exhibition.

The letters

There are more than 500 letters written between Élisabeth and her “eternal mate,” Natalie Barney, chronicling their shared life of fifty-two years. Hardly anybody outside Élisabeth’s very private family knew about Natalie’s letters to her. Lily’s biographer Francesco Rapazzini has read them all, and he tells me that they differ significantly in tone from those Barney wrote to the other woman in her life, painter Romaine Brooks, whom Barney met six years after falling in love with Lily. Comparing the two sets of correspondence makes it clear that Barney and Gramont treated their relationship as lifelong and primary. They both relegated the Barney-Brooks relationship to a lower order of importance.

The letters belonging to Natalie Barney have been kept at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet since Barney’s death in 1972. It would be an understatement to say “kept under lock and key.” They have also been kept under very watchful eyes by curators mindful of burnishing Barney’s literary reputation, and researchers tell stories about items mysteriously “disappearing” from files. Lily’s letters were not to be published until 2004, fifty years after Lily’s death. Whether this embargo was contractual or merely stated verbally, Barney’s executors definitely knew about the Lily letters, and they lied about them to biographers and scholars for decades. What this means for readers of belles-lettres is that at least five books have been written about Natalie Barney and her circle based on incomplete facts and wrong conclusions. As cottage industries go, the Lily letters are a big deal.

And wait till you read some of them for yourself. 2016 will mark the 100th anniversary of Lily and Natalie’s secret marriage contract, made during the stress of wartime at a flashpoint after seven years together. They tended to write sparingly in English, and even then only for logistics, saving passion for French. I’m lucky to be translating some of them into English. Many of these letters are lesbian literary classics; others are simply the sexiest things I’ve ever read.

Natalie Barney had already conquered the world’s most desirable woman, courtesan Liane de Pougy, when she met Éiisabeth de Gramont. Taking Lily to bed was, by Natalie’s way of reckoning, something like conquering the world’s second most desirable.

Lily, of course, would have laughed. As the song goes, she was The Top from day one.

Childhood: la petite prince

Childbirth in 1874 was traumatic for Élisabeth and deadly for her mother, Princesse Isabelle de Beauvau-Craon. The baby girl, now a motherless child, shared a birthday with William Shakespeare. And so April 23 was as auspicious a day as it was tragic for Élisabeth. She had been born with the soul of a writer into one of the most storied families in France, with a proud heritage dating to medieval times and blood ties to the princely house of Grimaldi in Monaco. All the men in her family were dukes. Élisabeth would only match that storied rank through marriage. She would then race to outstrip it in love, fame and accomplishment.

Isabelle’s widower was a young Army officer stationed across the country. Her father, Prince Marc de Beauvau-Craon, was a merry widower himself. So baby Lily was sent to Paris to be raised in central heating by her doting paternal grandmother. They called her “the little queen.”

Lily was imperious by nature. By the age of three, she was already directing her English nanny to run the cold bath her Gran demanded for “instilling character,” while bribing the French nanny to run a hot tub on the side. The cold bath was, of course, only for show. French children were rarely even to be seen after five o’clock in the Gilded Age, let alone heard splashing around in the bath.

Her father’s remarriage posed logistical challenges to Lily’s imperial way of life. Lucky she adored her new stepmother, Marguerite de Rothschild. Papa and Maman Marguerite insisted on setting up house near Papa’s barracks so they could look after the petite prince themselves. No more run of the house in Paris with gardens sloping down to the Seine! Soon there was a new baby. Then two more.

Marguerite’s father had disowned her for marrying against his wishes, but when he died, Marguerite’s mother and sisters reinstated her inheritance. Lily now had one of the world’s richest stepmothers. Once again, her life changed overnight.

If that wasn’t enough to cramp Lily’s style, there were problems backstairs. In a real-life Cinderella story, Lily was treated by the staff as a penniless Beauvau-Craon; her three siblings were treated like Rothschilds. By the age of eight, she had tired of sitting at the corner table. Francesco Rapazzini tells the funny story of Lily’s bold offensive to regain control of her territory. One evening at teatime, she attacked a serving plate of spinach with her bare hands, hurling green muck at every aproned target. Bull’s eye. Bull’s eye. Bull’s eye.

Maman Marguerite intervened with loving discipline that the petite prince accepted with her characteristic stoic detachment. The battle had been lost but somehow the war had been won. From that point on, the staff lived in terror and the four Gramont children did as they pleased. Lily starred as chief ruffian. There were never any clean knees on inspection and only one rule in the sandbox: no kicks to the stomach. Christian piety did not survive Lily’s First Holy Communion. When miracles didn’t happen, Lily went back to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. For the rest of her life she would only enter a church under duress, and when making her will in 1922 she expressly forbade any religious services, leaving her burial to “my daughters and Miss Barney.”

Lily had inherited a lovely, small castle from her grandfather, Prince Marc. Nobody could lord over her there. For a month or two every summer, Lily and her siblings ran wild on the farm while their parents gallivanted around Europe, soaking in fashionable spas. Lily wandered her fields and streams, evading her dull tutors; she visited her royal aunt, married to her Choiseul uncle, whose liberal politics fascinated her just as much as the gruesome tale of his mother’s murder by his own father. Lily played the flute. She stole forbidden books from the locked bookcase and read them beneath the shade trees. Whatever her voracious eyes feasted on became what her greedy mind devoured. Much later, somebody who knew her well commented, “When she peers at you through her lorgnette, she is trying to see if you are edible.” Soon she was translating Keats.

The seaside held equal pride of place in her heart, ever since that visit to Nice where she developed her first crush on an eponymous girl, a wild teenager a few years older. From the older Lily, Élisabeth learned the power and attraction of sex appeal–female sex appeal in particular–and disdain for convention. Her passion for the sea itself was evident from an early age. When she would emerge from the waves at Deauville, smiling like the sun, gawkers ogled. Naturally her parents occupied themselves at the casino. Élisabeth hardly ever went there as as an adult, even though she spent as much time as she could in rented cottages near Hornfleur, the gay hotspot of her era.

From reluctant débutante to chronicles of the Belle Époque

She was a reluctant débutante, to put it mildly. Her sense of duty alone explains her compliance. I can only image how she lasted through balls like the one her father gave in 1894, when Consuelo Vanderbilt was presented to European society and, soon thereafter, sold off to the Duke of Marlborough. Lily’s feminist sensibilities already rankled at the notion that marriage conferred any sort of status upgrade to the chattel that was traded. As far as she could see, marriage was nothing but imprisonment. She would prove prescient. At eighteen, however, she tolerated the scene because her insatiable curiosity got the better of her: she couldn’t wait to see what her outrageous friend, Robert de Montesquiou, would get up to next. Montesquiou famously became the model for Proust’s depraved Baron de Charlus. Lily befriended Marcel Proust in 1903, invited him to her exclusive parties, footed his champagne bill at the Ritz on many memorable occasions, and thus became one of the two unwitting models for his Duchesse de Guermantes. After his death she wrote about him.

Whether writing about Proust or food or music or golf, all Lily’s books bore the stamp of a first class intellect. She loved to laugh. In private she agreed with Natalie Barney that Proust hadn’t known the first thing about lesbians. But in defending Proust throughout her lifetime, for instance, she deftly accomplished opposing aims at the same time: always broadcasting and dignifying her belle époque sensibilities, while at the same time validating (even having fun with) the collapse of the ancien régime. She delighted readers with four volumes of memoirs that let you imagine what it was like to have been born in the age of the horse-drawn carriage; to have come of age by motorcar under electric lights, seeing Cubism and hearing Stravinsky for the first time; to have received deposed kings and queens at home one day, and then amputees at a railway station the next during World War I; only to have awakened from those horrors to the Jazz Age. And then the Crash.

The red duchess

Inspired by Marxism from a young age, scarred by World War I and repulsed by the rise of Hitler, her communist activities had earned Élisabeth the nickname “red duchess” by 1932. Her visit to the Soviet Union in 1931 had been so carefully scripted that she’d returned with no inkling of plans for forced famine in the Ukraine.

But when she went back to Moscow at 60 in 1935, horrified to find that all her contacts had disappeared without a trace, she acknowledged the deception, cut her trip short and rushed home to Paris to decry the criminality of Soviet communism.  This is only one of many such examples of a woman with such intellectual integrity that she had no trouble–no trouble whatsoever–changing her views (or even the fabric of her life) to suit emerging facts. To translate Élisabeth de Gramont: avant-gardiste is to reproduce many of these profiles in courage so deftly painted by her biographer, Francesco Rapazzini.

She returned from Moscow changed but unbowed. By no means did Élisabeth de Gramont ever abandon her left-wing convictions. In fact, she would soon go on to support the marxist Front Populaire in the successful 1936 election. She tried not to look or sound disappointed after her friends withdrew their offer of a legislative seat. (France is ready for a woman Senator, yes surely, fair enough: but a lesbian? That is taking femininity too far!)

The ardent suitor

At 34, the mother of two children, Lily went out to dinner and came home changed forever. She had fallen in love at first sight with the rich American lesbian heiress so notorious that she was called L’Amazone. Or maybe it wasn’t first sight. Maybe the two women had noticed one another at the ballet, the opera, the theater….but hadn’t been properly introduced. In any event, tonight it was spontaneous combustion with Natalie Barney, who had just moved into No. 20, rue Jacob, where she would preside over the most famous literary salon in Paris between the wars. As for Lily, although she’d never even kissed a girl before, she had the courage not to deny the life-changing aspects of that first encounter, which happened on or around her 34th birthday, at a supper party given by her girlhood friend, the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.

Love with “Natly” compared favorably to the opium Lily had learned to smoke on her trip to the far east. Love with Natly was a new planet. It happened on the riverbanks in plain view and paired well with chicken sandwiches. It happened in railway cars when you had a fever of a hundred and three. It happened when you could make up a plausible lie and sneak off to a nearby hotel in the south of France.

It happened for nights on end aboard a barge floating the Seine. It happened by sneaking her into your castle at night. And it even happened at her place in Paris, on the floor in the doorway with your hat and diamonds on before you had to dash to meet the girls at the theater. Lesbian love awakened Lily’s dormant senses. All of them.

As for her contributions…. In 1912, Lily gave us the true adventure story of escaping household lockdown imposed by her husband, fleeing the castle with two young daughters in tow, like something out of a swashbuckler by Dumas père. At 45 in 1920 Lily gave us a culinary classic: the best-selling Almanach des Bonnes Choses de France. Shortly thereafter we have the duchess divorcing the duke for cruelty. Unheard of. (Divorce left her virtually penniless and, thereafter, chronically short of money.) By 1924, she’d gathered the world’s cutting-edge musicians together on Thursdays at home and given us short haircuts for women, prompting Gertrude Stein to order Alice Toklas to get out the shears. Lily never took credit for the Roman Emperor look, but she was by now a proven tastemaker. And that was just for starters.

Always on the edge of the new, she remained a timeless classic, a grande dame of the old, old school. As Dolly Wilde learned the hard way, you were toast if you even tried to tutoie this woman who vouvoied her own husband and children. (“They will get the wrong idea about you and me,” Lily scolded Dolly. Of course they would; and they did; and they were right.)

Where did you really stand with the duchess? It could be hard to know. She was impulsive, changeable, mercurial, unpredictable. But she was loyal–even to the point of developing an enduring relationship with her one-time rival, Romaine Brooks. It inspired the same degree of loyalty in others. Long after divorce stripped her of her courtesy title, most people still called her Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre, refusing to acknowledge any slippage in high rank. Although Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre came across as deeply human, intensely curious, without prejudice and conversant with every foible and frailty, her eyesight was so poor that she peered at the world through a lorgnette. It enhanced the hauteur that was such a part of her charm, along with her laugh, of the kind described by the French as a “string of pearls.” Natalie Barney often commented that Élisabeth’s myopia only sharpened the acuity of all her other senses, including her “sixth sense,” the perception of truth in and through the the body. Natalie thought of it as the sense of pleasure.

The turning point

Lily met Natalie, the love of her life, in 1909, not in 1910 as all of Natalie’s biographers believed. It was probably from Lily’s arms that Natalie emerged one morning that November to walk home past the florist. Lily’s husband was away all that month; the Amazon had the (then) marquise to herself, and they could even have spent furtive nights together, the other side of midnight, at the rue Lauriston. Natalie always took pains to leave her lovers before dawn; I can imagine her sending an order of flowers to Lily’s and then deciding, at the last minute, to take along an an extra armful for her unrequited longtime love, Pauline Tarn.

Pauline, another famous poet who had dumped Natalie in 1901 and wrote under the pen name Renée Vivien, had for years been allowing her life to ebb away in a haze of alcoholism, addiction to chloral hydrate, sexual obsessions and anorexia. She had already tried at least once to kill herself, and she’d been seriously ill since springtime. These days she was bedridden.

Failed suicide aside, things with “petit Paul” were a little tense. Sure, Natalie had been chronically unfaithful during their five years together. But Vivien had left Natalie for a woman Natalie detested–Lily’s cousin, Hélène de Rothschild, Baronne van Zuylen van Nyveldt (whom Natalie called “La Brioche” for her heft), and all three women were now keeping a very uneasy truce trying to provide hospice care for the poet on a death slide. Lily, whose cardinal sin was pride not jealousy, would have taken a managerial, if detached, role. She would have encouraged kindness in Natalie, who was never strong on compassion. Natalie (always a jealous lover with a conquering hero modus operandus) would have known she was pleasing Lily in being extra thoughtful that morning.

“Take her flowers,” Natalie might have heard Lily murmuring from her early morning slumber. And so she would have gathered a nosegay of violets before she left the shop. Still, I can imagine Natalie’s heart in her throat as she approached Vivien’s door. Loving kindness and tending the sick was one thing; running into that bitch La Brioche who stole your girlfriend was another. Francesco Rapazzini picks up the true story from here:

The morning of 18 November 1909, the American bought violets, their special flowers, to give to her former lover. As soon as she rang the doorbell at [Viven’s place on] the avenue du Bois, today the avenue Foch, it was opened by a new butler, one she didn’t know.

“Mademoiselle has just died,” the man informed her in his liveried monotone, as if he had just said, “Mademoiselle has just gone out.”

Stunned, Natalie tried to step inside. To give one last kiss to the woman she had loved. But La Brioche, who had only just appeared in the doorway, prevented her from going in. Natalie was reeling. She made Hélène promise she would place the flowers beside Renée Vivien’s body. She took a few steps down the street and fainted on a park bench. As soon as she recovered her senses, she had only one thought: to see Lily.

Élisabeth didn’t live far away; only the place de l’Étoile separated the two streets. It was the first time Natalie knocked at the front door of Lily’s house on the rue Lauriston. There she stood on the doorstep. She was pale and looking deathly ill, gripping a floral bouquet and weeping. This time there was no Brioche shutting the door in her face. Élisabeth reached out and took her in her arms.

The next day, Lily [who could be a superficial and aloof correspondent] wrote a letter that had nothing mundane or operatic about it. “Little blond, so adored and not a whit too much, your pansies haven’t left me since the moment I held you so close in the red light of my Orient room, when I tasted your lips a thousand times sweeter than honey–and this morning come more lilies–white lilies–red lilies–I’ve put them in the big red Chinese vase–and the memory of you floats all around me, it’s there all the time–it’s there, in scent, where you really came from, which is how I can believe so much in your real presence–but I would like to have you and never let you go, to have you here, coming and going and coming back again–I should like your arms around me–I should like your light to enter the room like rays of light coming through the windows–

“One can live any old way, but this is how one loves!”

Think no more of needing the pardon of “petit Paul”–I’m the one who will bear this burden for you, at least for now. Let me be the one. And in time, there will be relief. [….] My love, I love you, I love you, I want to live with you, have you all to myself, exhaust myself tirelessly in every joy of love with you until I’m senseless after you. You’re worth it, Blond Sorcerer.”

Natalie had confided in Élisabeth: she had finally admitted her sense of guilt over Renée Viven, her “petit Paul.” Vivien had loved Natalie, she explained, but had needed an exclusive kind of love that Natalie had not known how to give. Natalie, like every self-respecting Epicurean, now felt remorse and was asking for forgiveness.

From Élisabeth de Gramont (c) 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini

Translation (c) 2013 by Suzanne Stroh

 

It was a turning point. The major turning point in the life of a woman in love, with two small children and social obligations that routinely required bejewelled attire, a houseful of servants who loved to talk in a city that loved to talk, a husband who would soon return home to a hothouse and who would just as soon start putting two and two together… What now?

The first time they had made love, it had been Lily running away to regain her equilibrium. All summer, it had been Lily keeping the distance between them. Lily with such cool detachment that Natalie, dumbstruck, the Don Juan of her time, had begun a novel that only thinly disguised their relationship, wondering if she could, in truth, call herself Lily’s lover. “She’s never given herself to me….Perhaps she is too limitlesss to be possessed,” Natalie wrote. “Sometimes I fear it to be true, and sometimes I hope that it is.”

And now here was Natly knocking at the door to put the greatest distance of all between two people. Here was Natly in Lily’s arms, in her house, in the red room with lips like honey, filling her senses, crowding out every other memory. The genie was out of the bottle. Here was Natly on her knees, about to wreck Lily’s life, begging forgiveness for sins yet to be committed. She was incapable of sexual fidelity, she was trying to explain to the marquise. Whatever her problem was, Natalie didn’t understand it. But she knew it was a fatal affliction.

She’d fallen at the right woman’s feet for once.

Beyond the fleeting comforts of absolution that fateful morning of 18 November 1909, Lily gave Natalie a lifetime gift. She listened. She heard Natalie out. It never occurred to her to judge. All she had to offer in the face of such raw truth was acceptance. Deep human understanding. So with the courage it takes to love without imposing conditions, she extended the hand of compassion. Lily felt no need to change the woman she loved, and so there was no temptation to change her. Only the urge to bring Natalie back to life by loving her senseless–a gift, for her part, that Lily was now more eager than ever to bestow. And for Lily, all those gifts bestowed on an Amazon brought to her knees included bestowing one to herself: the courage to keep following her own heart, wherever it would lead.

The following spring on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1910, Élisabeth de Gramont turned thirty-five years old. She wasn’t easy to live with, she changed like the weather and flitted about constantly between houses, she was hopeless without a box at the opera or a lorgnette (which would never change with the times), and she could be caustic and fatally direct, suffering no fools. But for the first time in her life, love was aflame. She felt free as fire. The great adventure was only just beginning.

Was it really a hundred years ago?

Suzanne Stroh

With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.