Plover’s eggs by a Dutch Master…Lily’s favorite Epicurean delight
Plover’s eggs. It’s illegal to gather them today, but in 1909 the food writer at the International Herald Tribune had hunted them down at the CaféAnglais. And had this to report:
PARIS April 24 Have you ever eaten an omelette of plover’s eggs? Two men bent on a new experience did so one morning recently . . . Twelve eggs, by the way, were needed for its making. Questioned on the subject last evening, the “maître d’hôtel” at the CaféAnglais, second to none the wide world o’er for its cuisine, and happily keeping to the old traditions, replied that omelets of the sort were asked for so rarely as to amount practically to never. “If desired we serve them of course, but if my opinion were asked I should be inclined to express disapproval. The plover’s egg is too ‘serré.’” That settles the matter.
Six days later…
“Bottle of Chateau Yquem Fetches $117,000 at Auction.” That was 2011. What did it cost in 1909, and how easy would it have been for Natalie to get her hands on a bottle from the “comet year”? Was it this wine that launched their lifetime together?
Across town on the Left Bank at No. 20, rue Jacob, Miss Barney was cooling a pricey Sauternes. And making sure her cook had gathered the plover’s eggs for a memorable May Day repast. ‘Serré…’ I can almost hear Natalie Barney thinking. She’d no doubt read the piece in the Herald. Well if plover’s eggs were good enough for Oscar Wilde, they’re good enough for a daughter of France….
April 30, 1909: A daughter of France was indeed coming over. The marquise deClermont–Tonnerre. ÉlisabethdeGramont.
Lily. Here.
I can imagine both women standing in front of their wardrobes, agonizing over what to wear on their first date.
Biographer Francesco Rapazzini picks up the story from here:
The exact date of their first encounter is unknown, but one thing’s for sure: the two women were attracted from the start. Lily was in search of lesbian adventure; Natalie knew how to take her there. Renée Vivien, Lucie Delarue–Mardrus, Colette: hadn’t they also given their gay virginities to Natalie?
There was an invitation following that evening with the Mardruses. Soon the marquise found herself at Miss Barney’s. What happened next has been described by Natalie’s biographer Jean Chalon, paraphrasing Saint-Simon: “They came together, mind and soul, in the sublime intermingling of two rare spirits.”
Natalie and Lily wasted no time acting on their desires: everything had been clear from the beginning. Lily was looking for a true companion, not just another friend. All the long hours spent with Lucie Delarue–Mardrus, talking and listening and analyzing her own sex drive, served Élisabeth up to Natalie on a silver platter.
A blue room the way Picasso saw it
Their first night together, spent between 30 April and 1 May 1909, was one of love shared in Natalie’s bedroom at No. 20, rue Jacob. Natalie’s room was painted all in blue, including the bedstead, down to the floorboards, covered with a white bearskin rug that had been the gift of Liane dePougy. One of the two windows looked out on the garden with its Greek temple “of Friendship.” Legend has it that the temple, along with the house, was built for Adrienne Lecouvreur[1] by maréchal Saxe[2]. Every year for the rest of their lives–except when the second world war kept them apart–they would try to spend at least a few hours together on the first of May celebrating their anniversary.
The first night was followed by a second, and on the second day they still couldn’t bear to separate. Philibert was away and the girls, Béatrix and Diane, were in good hands with the staff at home. For the first time, Lily felt free.
But on the third day, 3 May, Lily tore herself from Natalie’s embrace and returned home to the rue Lauriston. It was six o’clock at night when she shut the door behind her, took off her hat and gloves, looked in on her daughters and rushed over to her writing desk. “I am sad to death over leaving you,” she wrote feverishly. “Why, since I’m going to see you tomorrow? It feels like I’ve broken a spell–that I will return to you a stranger, only for a few brief hours there with you where I have nothing of my own–”with” you there in your atmosphere–your attendant in your life of flowers made for distilling perfumes, incense, intoxication; living only on flames and sunbeams. This calm solitude where I am now, it pleases me more than ever–because in this solitude, where I only have myself to please, nothing can intrude on the perfect world except you and me. […] But so many things demand my attention–interruptions–the ransom I must pay for all the happiness you give me! […] I kiss your hands, your caressing hands I’ve allowed everywhere, fluid as the water we love! Till tomorrow my love.”
This first letter from Élisabeth to Natalie reveals Lily’s impulsive, passionate nature. But it also shows her need for personal space, for solitude, to gather herself and reflect on the new woman in her life as much as on the physical passion that had taken her by storm. She had never before felt such intense physical pleasure. Not with her husband, not with Albert Flament, nor with any of her other male suitors. Natalie helped Élisabeth to reconcile herself, at last, with her body. With the American, she finally came to know her own body as something other than a source of suffering and an object of torture. It could experience pleasure.
How much time had passed between their first encounter and their first night together? The American hadn’t needed to employ her usual seduction tactics. Lily was ready–ripe, even–for Sapphic love. Natalie hadn’t had to force her hand. Lily had been waiting for the right woman. The woman who would make her want to say “yes.”
And how did Lily take her first steps down the path of lesbian sexuality? It’s one thing to fantasize, another to have the courage to live out one’s desires. Paris at the turn of the century was known throughout the world as the pleasure capitol, a safe haven of tolerance. There were no laws against homosexuality–masculine or feminine–and the enjoyment of this privilege was the exclusive domain of high society and the chattering classes. The lower classes were loath to accept those they considered perverts. But male and female homosexuals were welcomed in nearly every salon and even in most households, as long as they skirted scandal. It just wasn’t discussed. Take the Gramont family, for example. The subject of Lily’s sex life was simply never raised. In public, neither her brothers, her sister, her stepbrother, her stepsisters nor her nephews ever made a single allusion to their “lesbian aunt” or sister. “It was something nobody talked about,” remembers Élisabeth’s nephew, Comte RenédeGramont. “Everybody knew that my aunt loved women, but it didn’t concern any of us. She was discreet. And so were we.”
And Philibert? In the beginning, he had no clue about what was going on. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Except that his wife seemed a bit happier. And was always being sent flowers. In time he would discover Lily’s liaison and redouble his violent outbursts.
For now, Élisabethdidn’t ask herself too many questions about this Sapphic love. Hadn’t she decided, the day after returning from North Africa, that from now on she would live as she wished? If that meant living with a woman, so be it. It’s worth remembering that Élisabeth was, after all, a product of the upper crust. And the upper crust reserved its prerogative: pay no attention to petty critics.
ÉlisabethdeGramont (c) 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini
Translation (c) 2013 by Suzanne Stroh
Seven years later, and then for the next four decades, celebrating their May first anniversary would get a little more complicated when Natalie would take up with an American painter born on that day, Romaine Brooks. I can almost hear Lily stifling a laugh when Francesco Rapazzini comments, “Too bad for Romaine.” May Day remained sacrosanct for the staunchly faithful yet non-manogamous couple, because for Lily, a woman whose mother had died in giving her life, she had never felt much like celebrating her birthday on 23 April. Besides, Rapazzini explains, Lily’s rigorous, analytical mind never stopped reminding her that she had never actually chosen to be born. For someone so independent, dedicated to perpetual becoming and self-determination, what was the use in celebrating that? “The first of May was Élisabeth’s true birthday: the birth of love, of the pleasures of the flesh, of sexuality. And so it had to be celebrated at all costs. Which Natalie never failed to do.”
As I rediscover lost lesbian history working on this translation, I’m uncovering other intrigues along the way. Like how the most fascinating things about secret histories are the little things you’ll never know.
Like about that bottle of Château Yquem they drank. Was it from the comet year? That was back in 1811…. If you wanted to launch a thousand ecstasies, that’d be your wine…. I seem to recall a 200-year-old bottle selling for something like $117,000 a few years ago.
Discounting feverishly, I can see it would have been well within Natalie’s price range. It would have been rare and prized even in 1909, certainly. Something she might have considered splurging on, even though she herself never drank more than “two thimblefuls” of alcohol at one sitting.
But on April 30, 1909, Natalie didn’t yet know how much the Epicurean Lily disliked that wine (Sauternes in general and Yquem in particular).
And on April 30, 2013, not being a dessert wine drinker myself, I’ll never know if Lily’s aversion was a matter of taste, of personal preference, or because it triggered her migraines (the way it triggers mine)… or if it was really because her Gramont forebear had been fighting for the British during that particular war! (“Awkward,” as my 11-year-old would say.)
Comet year or not, the moon is full overhead, the night is lit up like a ballet outside my window, and it’s looking like the perfect time to compose and send that billet, wrangle those fresh eggs and put that pricey wine on ice.
Happy May Day from Virginia.
Plover’s eggs, comet years and gay marriage aside, Virginia’s still for lovers. And that’s good enough for me.
[1] Adrienne Lecouvreur (1692-1730), the popular actress allegedly poisoned by her rival, then memorialized by her friend, Voltaire.
[2] Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750), Marshal General of France, one of the eight illegitimate children acknowledged by the king of Poland, although more than 300 are believed to have been born.
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.
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.
Great Reading Rooms: Quiet in the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet!!!
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.
Lily in full-anime boyhood as “Guiche de Gramont.” Her legend appears to have inspired a manga artist.
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.
The Front Populaire won seats in the 1936 election on an anti-fascist platform, but in the end Lily was denied a Senate seat.
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.
Love aboard
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.
After divorcing Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnèrre, in 1920, Élisabeth wrote under her maiden name of Gramont
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.)
Old school. Thanks to Francesco Rapazzini for this photo used in the Italian translation of his book.
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.
Natalie stole away at dawn. Walking home, she stopped by the florist and decided to take a nosegay of violets over to Renée Vivien, who was bedridden.
“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.
On her way, she had the presence of mind to stop by the florist again. She’d already had one door slammed in her face by a Rothschild. What was it like to stand on Lily’s doorstep for the first time?
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.
“more lilies–white lilies–red lilies–I’ve put them in the big red Chinese vase–“
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.
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.
April is said to be the cruelest month. And so it was for Renée Vivien in 1909, when, towards the end of the month, the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus gave a supper party for Natalie Barney that would change Vivien’s life forever.
And not for the better.
Forget everything you thought you knew about April in Paris
The biography I’m translating, Élisabeth de Gramont by Francesco Rapazzini, has upended everything I thought I knew about that fateful April in Paris 1909. Shortly after Lucie introduced Barney to her childhood friend Lily de Gramont, the (very married) Marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre, they became lovers like two flames leaping together, “free as fire.” Sexual awakening with a soulmate served up an intensity Lily had never known, one Natalie hadn’t tasted herself…since her starcrossed affair with Vivien.
All through that spring and summer, it was a season of wonder and sensuous delight for Lily. For Renée Vivien, not so much. By July, she would be penniless and hanging on to life by a thread, relying on the sole support of Lily’s cousin, Hélène de Rothschild. In November, she would be dead. Of suicide.
Until now, and for more than 50 years since Élisabeth’s own death, key dates of 1909 and their portentious events were unknown to some of the world’s best belles-lettres biographers.
Rewriting the history of the grandes dames by translating French to English: exciting stuff.
My adventures in translating have also led me to one of Vivien’s more sympathetic and sensitive interpreters, the filmmaker Jane Clark, who wrote and directed a sexy short film about Vivien.
Renée Vivien? Who’s she?
For those of you who don’t know the radical poetry or the tragic legend of Renée Vivien, she was born Pauline Tarn in London in 1876. Her mother was an American from my home state of Michigan. Her father inherited a Scottish merchant legacy and died when Renée was a little girl.
Renée Vivien (or her impersonator?)
Having spent the happiest years of her childhood in France, she endured a traumatic adolescence–some of it under lock and key–dominated by her abusive mother until, at 21, Renée finally inherited the fortune that allowed her to return to Paris and dedicate her life to poetry. She wrote exclusively in French. If that wasn’t radical enough, she dressed like Hamlet. Taking it to the limit, she rejected male-dominated institutions and did her best to retire from society that would never accept her uncompromising feminism. This didn’t do much to discourage her fans, so Vivien resorted to hiring impersonators to stand in at her own poetry readings. She translated Sappho from the famous Greek fragments that had only recently been discovered among the rubbish heaps excavated at Oxyrynchus.
In America, her poetry is as unknown today as Sappho’s was then. In France, she’s a big deal.
In 1899, the virginal Vivien met the worldly Natalie Barney at the theatre. It was a coup de foudre. Vivien knew right away her life would never be the same.
It wasn’t. The lively Barney, already a master of the seductive arts and sciences at 24, was reeling from a scandalous grande passion with the Angelina Jolie of her era, the courtesan Liane de Pougy. Basically, Barney had just been dumped by the world’s most desirable woman. Turns out, Pougy had not wanted to be saved from prostitution after all. Barney wasn’t just heartbroken. She was humiliated.
Liane de Pougy: the Angelina Jolie of 1899.
But where does a young Don Juan go after Angelina Jolie? Such were Barney’s thoughts, clutching the “Dear John” letter while riding through the Bois de Boulogne in her coach, when Renée began to recite one of her poems. Beauty in all its forms would always get Barney’s complete attention. And so it did that day in 1899.
Now she put heart and soul into redirecting what biographer Diana Souhami calls Vivien’s “longing to be dead.” The two young women began their mismatched love affair in dizzying purity with poetry on their lips, kneeling before one another in a room stuffed with blazing candles and overblown lilies. But Barney’s faithless passion had awakened more than puppy love in Vivien, who was already a chloral hydrate addict by that time. I have never seen the edgy, impetuous, dangerous side of Viven’s character portrayed so well as how it is channeled, rather than merely acted, by Traci Dinwiddie in THE TOUCH. Necar Zadegan does a good job with Kérimé Turkhan Pasha, too. Their chemistry is incredible. You can rent the eight-minute film here for a nominal fee on Filmbinder.
Past is prologue
Traci Dinwiddie is uncanny as Renée Vivien in THE TOUCH by filmmaker Jane Clark
Los Angeles-based writer/director Jane Clark is also the producer behind the longest screen kiss in film history. While making gritty, topical films like that one (ELENA UNDONE, dir. Nicole Conn 2010) and METH HEAD, now touring the festival circuit, she seeks out character-driven stories in all genres, including romance. One of my favorite genres, too. Clark predicts it will soon undergo a major resurgence, with possibilities opening up in all directions as younger audiences bring their broadened minds to the movies along with their buying power. Will that mean more (and better!?) period dramas and romances about The Lost Generation and their forebears? I hope so.
I’ll publish my conversation with Jane Clark in the days to come. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy THE TOUCH. It’s a slice of life gone by: a furtive meeting in Paris, a moment of stolen passion that took place between a besotted poet and a beautiful Turkish Vizier’s wife living in seclusion in 1906. (Kérimé’s husband, Turkhan Pasha, formerly Foreign Minister of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Paris in 1899 as head of the Turkish delegation to the Peace Conference that followed the Treaty of Paris.) Jane Clark bases her film on this gorgeous, sexy poem. It out-Beaus Beaudelaire, don’t you think?
The Touch
The trees have kept some lingering sun in their branches,
Veiled like a woman, evoking another time.
The twilight passes, weeping. My fingers climb,
Trembling, provocative, the line of your haunches.
My ingenious fingers wait when they have found
The petal flesh beneath the robe they part.
How curious, complex, the touch, this subtle art—
As the dream of fragrance, the miracle of sound.
I follow slowly the graceful contours of your hips,
The curve of your shoulders, your neck, your unappeased breasts.
In your white voluptuousness my desire rests,
Swooning, refusing itself the kisses of your lips.
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.
I’ve begun a new literary adventure, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the year to come. I’ll be translating the raucous biography of an incredible woman, Élisabeth de Gramont, from French into English. If you read French, you can buy the book here.
Here’s a sketch by André Rouveyre of them visiting their friend Rémy de Gourmont, the literary tastemaker responsible for lionizing Barney and giving her the name she spent a lifetime living up to: L’Amazone
2018 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first modern marriage contract between two women, made by Élisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnèrre, a central figure in the artistic and political history of modern France, and her “eternal mate,” Natalie Barney, that consummate American in Paris.
The amazing untold story of a secret lesbian marriage
Their beautiful, radical, non-monogamous and staunchly faithful union lasted a lifetime until Élisabeth’s death in 1954, which shattered Natalie to the core. Astonishingly, all this was kept secret until Francesco Rapazzini published his biography in 2004, with the full support and generous cooperation of Élisabeth’s very private family.
Wild Blue
As a daughter of Michigan and a lesbian with a family business background of my own, I knew all about the railway carriage heiress of the Belle Époque when I was growing up. It may have been the heyday of NCR, but my father still taught me to pinpoint Dayton, Ohio on the map as the home producer of Barney cars. Barney was a great family business that he rued the end of. For as Walter Matthau’s butler quips famously in A New Leaf, my father (like Natalie herself, whose beautiful French was more 1793 than 1923) was a modern man who liked to keep alive traditions that were dead before he was born.
As I grew older and understood the gayness that he had taken for granted all my life, Dad made it quietly known that the wild child from Cincinnati was no role model. She was a model for bad behavior on par with the wayward Peggy Guggenheim. Certainly not a fit spiritual great-granny for a girl like me. Wild Blue, I always thought of Natalie with her untamed blonde mane and her steel-blue gaze. I’d find myself shaking my head in grudging admiration of her outrageous exploits in Bar Harbor and Washington, not to mention her audacious seduction of Liane de Pougy, the world’s most desirable woman, as a nineteen year-old American in Paris.
It goes without saying that my dance card was never as full, nor were my date nights. In fact we couldn’t have been more different.
Natalie was a much better rider, for one thing. She fenced and spoke French bilingually. My eyes and hair were dark, like Élisabeth’s, and like Lily de Gramont, I had a commanding voice that drew attention, a quick long laugh and a love of the countryside, the water and the wild places. And if my gaze was sometimes just as imposing, it was never predatory. Natalie’s was.
It was better in a Barney car
Like every other girl of my ilk, though, I found it hard to ignore Natalie Barney, even though she, too, was dead before my gay history was born. We were worlds apart in many of our tastes if not in our drives. She never set foot in a café, for instance, whereas I could live in them. I prized domestic anchorage; I valued love and loves placed in a lifelong context, while Natalie appeared to have no use for such things as marriage or children or even for making her life with animals. But my God, what a lover….
They got it wrong–for 40 years!
Natalie died in Paris in 1972 when I was seven. I watched and read, during my lifetime, as an entire cottage industry was built up around Barney as a legendary (some would say fatal) seducer, largely for her leading role as a patron of the arts to the Lost Generation. And now I realize that, in key respects, all the scholars and memoirists got it wrong. Like majorly wrong. It’s like that great Cary Brothers song…
Blue eyes, you’re the secret I keep
Cary Brothers, “Blue Eyes” from “Who You Are”
By translating EDG, I’ll start putting it right by getting to know the wonderful secret Natalie kept so close to her heart, hiding her in plain sight. You will not believe the passion, the fireworks, the honesty and the agony in their love letters.
“Je vous présente Élisabeth, la duchesse rouge”
More importantly, I’ll introduce English readers for the first time to the incredibly full and rich (and, yes, complex) life of an extraordinary character in 20th century history. Élisabeth was a Marxist descended from Henri IV who shrugged off the slur “red duchess.” She was a popular author and sculptor and librettist, a music patron and the major clef to Proust’s great roman. Lily was another wild child who would never be tamed. She was the only woman Natalie Barney could never control. Élisabeth was also the clef to Natalie’s own living work of art, the one she dedicated her life to and hoped and dreamed it would become. Above all, Lily loved to laugh.
So if you are a reader of belles-lettres, a student of French cultural history from the Belle Époque through World War II, or a reader of the biographies and scholarly studies of the great lesbians of the 20th century, I hope you will enjoy my field reports in 2013.
If I complete four pages a day, I should have a draft ready by next Christmas. For now, glad to have you on my rope. We’re off into the wild blue yonder.
In Good Company
By the way, my first impression of this job is that literary translation hasn’t changed much since antiquity. It’s laborious, and taxing, and when you admire the author and have great affection for the subject, like I do, it’s incredibly satisfying. The loneliness sometimes brought about by the solitary nature of the work is more than compensated by the excellent company I keep at the end of my shift. My veteran editor, Jean-Loup Combemale, grew up in Paris on the rue Jacob and visited his grandparents a few doors down from Élisabeth on the rue de la Faisanderie. My able researcher, Vanessa Coulomb, brings an M.B.A.’s focus to the job of helping today’s English readers relate to la vieille France, along with a storied Norman childhood of her own. Thanks in advance to you both.
Acts of love and literature
Given today’s economy—less than 5% of all books sold annually in the US are translations of works published in a foreign language, according to The Nation—a major literary translation is usually an act of love, an undertaking in the great amateur tradition, which Élisabeth herself joined the ranks of when she translated the poems of John Keats as a young woman.
There are those who play for money, babe
There are those who play for fame
There are still those who only play
For the love of the game
T Bone Burnett, “Kill Switch”
from “The Criminal Under My Own Hat”
It’s a band of brothers and sisters I’m proud to be a part of. As I learn more about them and their august tradition dating from the advent of written language, I’ll pass it on. And if you have any questions or interests or stories of your own to tell, please share.
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.
