• 1 George Wickes related this quote in an article on Barney for the Paris Review in the Spring of 1975 (...)
• 2 Some important relationships, such as Barney’s decades-long friendship with Liane de Pougy, one of (...)

1“Miss Barney is a perfect example of an enchanting person not to write about” Janet Flanner, the famous American journalist for The New Yorker and longtime friend of Natalie Barney, claimed in 1972. Flanner’s politer refusal to write about her friend contributes to Barney’s legend and speaks to the complicated, contradictory, and critical role that she played in both LGBTQ and French literary history1. Despite Flanner’s admonition, this article disregards this warning to outline briefly some of the ways that sex, text, and artistic output converged not only in Barney’s binational personal life but also how she, as an avowed lesbian, was able to create one of the most influential Parisian salons of the Belle Epoque through the Inter-War years. Through both her personal life and her salon, a network of creative influences, collaborations, and romances were spawned that added to the rich tapestry of queer history from 1890 through the 1920s. One could write numerous articles, if not entire monographs, on the cross-fertilization, creative production, and intertextuality these relationships engendered. However, a complex analysis of decades of culture production and the underpinning relationships that generated these works far exceeds the purpose of this article. Rather, by focusing primarily on five interlocking and overlapping romantic relationships spanning Barney’s life, this analysis provides a series of signposts for further exploration of queer transatlantic collaborations and her salon that was, for decades, a queer creative epicenter.2

• 3 Examples of scholarly work underscoring Natalie Barney’s importance are books such as as M. Hawthor (...)
• 4 Messyness Editorial Team, “The Forgotten LGBT Queen of Paris and Her Secret Masonic Temple”, July 6 (...)

2For scholars who study same-sex desire among women in France in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Barney is a touchstone whose life and loves inspired numerous authors and artists.3 As legend has it and archives confirm, Barney was without doubt a force of nature both in her pursuit of women and her artistic productions. Yet, despite her extravagant reputation as a seductress/huntress, she considered herself a keeper of talent not hearts, even though it is often difficult to disentangle the hearts she conquered from the talents she prized4.

• 5 Barney enrolled in the Fall of 1889 at the age of twelve and then she attended Miss Ely’s (an exclu (...)
• 6 S. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, New York, Harper Collins, 2002, p. 40.

3Whereas Barney describes some disturbing encounters with male cousins when she was a young girl in the United States and enjoyed flirting with males, her sexual education and reputation as an almost irresistible seductress were firmly rooted in France. Often a trope in Belle Epoque literature for budding same-sex relations, girls’ schools were part of a network of imagined spaces for lesbian relations. It is highly probable that the prestigious Les Ruches (The beehives) girls school run by Marie Souvestre, daughter of the French philosopher and playwright, Emile Souvestre, provided Barney with a reinforcing framework for her own same-sex desire5. Indeed, Olive Strachey, sister of famed economist, Lytton Strachey, attended this school a decade before Barney and wrote a novel entitled Olivia in which she describes the sexual tensions between girls6. I highlight this education not only for its importance in Barney’s early éducation sentimentale” but because it was influential in forming Barney as a thinker, feminist, and writer, which would later contribute to Barney’s advocacy and support of female artists. Madame Souvestre’s philosophy that the girls should be educated to be independent minded, critical thinkers, socially and politically engaged, as well as artistically developed was radical for its time.

• 7 Natalie Barney’s father was scandalized by her first book of poetry, Quelques portraits-sonnets des (...)
• 8 N. Barney, Éparpillements, Paris, Sansot,1910, p. 149.

4Despite the bourgeois constraints of the Belle Epoque, Barney became an independent woman thanks to the enormous fortune she inherited from her father, and which allowed her to focus on her writing that produced five volumes of poetry, various memoirs, and epigrams without the need to work to support herself.7 She once wrote that “the most beautiful thing in life is creating oneself” and she did create “herself” –a literal and figurative lesbian legend that maps queer affective and artistic networks through her writings, her relationships, and her salon8. Much like the French boarding school that formed her, her own salon became its own beehive of intellectual encounters, sexual seduction, and creative nurturing. If France’s capital was known as Paris-Lesbos, her home at –rue Jacob was Mytilene.

• 9 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 52.

5Speculation about Natalie Barney’s sexual awakening and romantic escapades with both sexes has long been a subject of inquiry because of her reputation as a female Cassanova, but Barney claimed as an adult that by twelve she conclusively knew that she was attracted to her own sex and determined not to be dissuaded from her love of women9. At 15, Barney was at her parent’s posh summer home in Maine where many of America’s most wealthy and influential vacationed. After having sex with a visiting Russian girl, a Belgian diplomat who had been attracted to the adolescent divined her sexual orientation and traumatized her by calling her a “vicieuse”—and another word that she would never even write. She fled her parent’s summer home on the island to friends on the mainland where Barney made the fateful discovery of Sappho’s poetry, and this encounter was to be a life-changing experience. The shame she had felt at being called a pervert was reconstituted as pride in a long history of female same-sex attraction intertwined with lyrical poetry. Classical literature, and in particular, Sappho and poetry are preliminary ciphers to understanding Barney’s early adulthood. Thus, from early on in Barney’s life, same-sex attraction, literature, and cultural production were inextricably linked and valorized. These associations undoubtedly played a role later in adult life when she created one of Paris’s most renowned salons where non-normative sexualities were accepted and encouraged.

• 10 N. C. Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, Paris, Émile-Paul frères, 1929, p. 29.
• 11 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 161.

7Natalie Barney and Eva Palmer met in the posh summer haven of Bar Harbor, Maine, where the rich and well-connected families vacationed. As adolescent girls they were inseparable and spent their summers wondering through the area forests, riding horses, and most importantly, reading ancient Greek works in the original, especially poetry. In fact, it was after Alice Barney, Natalie’s mother, had created an “entertainment”/show for the community where Palmer read Greek poetry that Barney and she began their love affair. Leaving immediately after their performances, Barney writes “a liaison ensued where poetry, Plato’s Banquet, and nudism all had a part in our Arcadian life… We knew the sensual delights of our nudity amidst the river sources and on the mossy underwood. So accustomed were we to our nudity in a state of nature that, if someone fully dressed had surprised us, they and not us would feel shame”10. Although they were sent to different boarding schools, Palmer eventually made her way to Barney in Paris where she would not only meet other queer women but inspire them. As part of Barney’s orbit, she often performed at Barney’s salon or special event. Palmer and Barney loosely formed a couple for several years, which meant that Palmer was often actively complicit in Barney’s other liaisons— even helping her to convince and seduce other women for her11. Even though Palmer increasingly played the third wheel, she believed that her love for Natalie would eventually tame Barney’s wild heart: she was mistaken. While Palmer eventually began to see other women behind Barney’s back, their relationship suffered, and eventually they had a rift that lasted decades. Palmer remained in Barney’s circle long enough to witness several of Barney’s important romantic relationships, including two accomplished writers discussed in this article: the female Baudelaire, Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn), and Lucie Delarue-Mardus, the poetess of France. Central to Palmer’s, the auburn-haired beauty’s, attraction to Barney was their mutual love of Greek poetry, and in an ironic twist of fate, it was this love of all things related to ancient Greece that created a chain of events that would drive a wedge between them. While it was their romantic relationship that had enticed Palmer to follow Barney to Paris, it was their shared interest in and love of ancient Greek life that eventually led Palmer to meet the man that she would marry.

• 12 Colette is considered one of France’s great writers of the 20^th Century. Her Claudine series of boo (...)
• 13 Barney’s Temple d’amitié was a neo-classical temple in her large garden at her home on rue Jacob. T (...)

8Isadora Duncan, a performer at some of Barney’s weekly salons, had a brother named Raymond. Palmer met Raymond and his Greek wife, Penelope, whom she eventually housed at her home in Neuilly because of a threatened Communist general strike in May, 1905. Their quick and fateful recognition of each other was also due to their shared love of ancient Greek culture, which would lead them to travel together to Greece. Among the ancient ruins of Greece, Palmer met Penelope’s brother, Angelos Sikelianos, a future renowned Greek lyrical poet. The two would marry and spend their lives trying to revive and recreate ancient Hellenistic culture, particularly poetry, the Delphic Idea, and the Delphic Festival. Barney’s cold and disdainful treatment of Angelos caused a rupture in her relationship with Palmer, but not before Palmer became an inspiration for the minor character sketch of Miss Flossie’s auburn-haired lover in Colette’s Claudine s’en va12, performed the play Dialogue au soleil couchant with Pierre Louÿs and Colette for one of Barney’s salon events, and performed other readings and theater scenes at Barney’s Temple d’amitié13.

• 14 Eva’s tresses served as the model for Liane de Pougy’s 1906 eponymous novel, Yvée Lester (1906) who (...)
• 15 A. Leontis, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, Trenton, Princeton University Press 2020, p. 23 (...)

9Palmer had seriously considered a career on stage, and her magnificent hair certainly caught people’s attention14. The great Sarah Bernhardt hired Palmer to act in one of her stage productions, but Bernhardt eventually abandoned the production. Another well-known stage actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Tanner Campbell) or “Mrs. Pat” wished to hire Palmer as part of her acting troupe most associated with productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, and Barrie, believed that Palmer could become a great actress. She agreed to hire her and to train her on the condition that she renounce all contact and communication with Barney15. She refused, but Barney’s attempts to re-enact classical Greek arts as neo-Greek rites at her Temple d’amitié continued to inspire Palmer even though she never became a stage actress.

• 16 Théodore Reinach (1860-1928) was a man of many talents: lawyer, archaeologist, musicologist, and pr (...)
• 17 S. Perrot, “Compte rendu de Samuel N. Dorf, Performing antiquity: ancient Greek music and dance fro (...)

10What is evident early in Barney’s life is that her performance and artistic aesthetics were widely influenced by ancient Greek homoerotism, which for Barney, Eva Palmer, and Renée Vivien, embodied an antique Greek queer ethos. Undoubtedly, it was because of these shared visions of ancient Greece that Palmer was so quickly and easily drawn to Angelos Sikelianos, married him, and spent their marriage collaborating with him. These conjugal projects eventually culminated in their collaboration and organization of two Delphic festivals in 1927 and 1930. As one scholar has pointed out, Palmer and Barney took very different approaches to performance. While Barney, and others such as Théodore Reinach, saw Western culture as the heritage of ancient Greece and spent much of their lives trying in different ways to access and recover this envisioned Greece, Palmer’s method was opposite16. Her goal was to de-Westernize this vision of ancient Greece through a re-enactment of Greek performing arts, and she attempted to accomplish this through the use of both “archaeology and performance, but her main criterium was emotion: the most important in Greek tragedy was pathos, even if music or dance were not accurate, and that is why she relied on living performances”17. Sappho, ancient Greek poetry, music, and theater were to play a capital role in another of Barney’s queer collaborations. Sappho became a type of mirror for Barney, a role model to emulate, and it was Sappho’s poetry that allowed Barney and another great love, Renée Vivien, to express their passion.

• 18 N.C. Barney, Je m’en souviens, Paris, Sansot, 1910.
• 19 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p.144.
• 20 N.C. Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, op. cit., p. 230
• 21 C. Islert’s work on Renée Vivien specifically examines some of these intersections. Camille Islert, (...)

11Considering how enamored of Sappho and Classical and French poetry Barney was, it is hardly surprising that one of her first and most influential and artistically inspiring romances was with the poet Renée Vivien. A mismatch if ever there was one, their relationship was infused with visions of a classical world in which love, poetry, and spirituality were embodied in the figure of Sappho. While Barney was social, vibrant, flirtatious, a bon vivant, and drawn to life, Renée Vivien was introverted, depressive, prudish, and thanatotic. From this unlikely relationship, Vivien found a muse to inspire some of her earliest poetry such Études et preludes (1901) followed by Cendres et Poussières (1902) and other literary works such as Une femme m’apparut (1904), while Vivien inspired such works as Barney’s prose poem “Je m’en souviens” published in 190418. The cataclysmic and catalytic power of this relationship would echo for decades, long after Renee Vivien’s untimely death in 1909. Vivien wrote “Ah! Natalie! Natalie! If only you had loved me before shattering all my beliefs and illusions, how many regrets you would have spared us?”19. In response one might wonder how impoverished these literary and sexual histories might have been if they had managed a long and happy union. Likewise, Barney’s summed up this turbulent push-me-pull-me relationship thus: “I couldn’t live with or without her. I don’t’ know what was more punishing to me: our unhappy encounters or our separations… Perhaps death is the only thing that would end it20. While much could be said, and has already been written, on each poet’s influence on the other, the intertextuality, the shared metaphors, etc., this article does not develop those tropes in the interest of space21. While scholarly interest in Vivien has increased over the last decades, another of Barney’s loves, at one time more famous than Colette, has remained understudied.

• 22 H. Plat, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus : Une femme de lettres des années folles, Paris, Grasset, 1994, p. 7 (...)

12Barney’s literary liaisons underpinned with erotic desire extended to another famous female poet, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. She came from a well-to-do family in Normandy and had married the famous Orientalist and translator of Thousand and One Nights, Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1868-1949). Together, this couple would frequent an important artistic community that included such notables as Picasso, André Gide, Camille Claudel, Octave Mirabeau, Marguerite Moreno (renowned actress and great friend of Colette), and many others22. Her husband would be a primary force in her literary life as an editor, mentor, and promotor of her works even after their separation in 1915 and eventual divorce.

• 23 J. Chalon, Portraits of a Seductress, New York, Crown, 1979, 88. See also N. C. Barney, Souvenirs i (...)

13At the time she met Barney, Delarue-Mardrus was already a recognized and acclaimed poet and novelist. Her career spanned four decades in which she published over seventy books of fiction, poetry, memoirs, and plays, and Barney would serve as a subject, muse, or model for several of these literary works including L’Ange et les pervers (1930), and Nos secrètes amours (1951). Mardrus’s romantic relationship with Barney left her disillusioned and hurt; yet, the two women maintained a strong friendship until Mardrus’s death in 1945 during which they continued to share their intimate thoughts and detail about their lives. As Barney’s biographer, Jean Chalon, writes: “A bond was established between Natalie and Lucie ‘that wavered between love and friendship,’ then resolved itself in continuing mutual appreciation and support.” Indeed, it was even Mardrus who found the property that became the famous Barney salon for the next half century23. Her relationship with Barney was to mark her for life, and her ambivalent description of Laurette in her novel L’Ange et les pervers emblematizes her complicated relationship with Barney. In 1957, twelve years after Mardrus’s death, Natalie Barney posthumously published a collection of Mardrus’s poems entitled Nos secrètes amours, in which she wrote of her desire for Barney and of Barney’s love, infidelity, and ultimately, her rejection. This collection of poetry illustrates the extended romantic tension between Barney and Mardrus; and, although these poems were published after her death, they do shed light on the coincidence of heterosexual marriage and lesbian relationships within Mardrus’s affective life during the Belle Époque. It is another literary testament to Barney’s role as muse for Paris’s evolving queer communities. Because Mardrus’s husband often edited her works and offered literary advice, he might very well have read these poems or parts of them. One does not find in them the motifs of salvation through art and sisterhood that are so prevalent in Vivien’s poetry. Rather, many of these poems display a frank sexuality and other physical elements that are more sensual. Poems such as “La Bête” from Nos secrètes amours are clear indications of her passionate physical love and attraction to Barney, and its verses such as “nous pencherons sur toi notre corps et notre âme,/Bouche intime, nudité de la nudité,/Tendre et mystérieux repli de la beauté,/Rose coquille où vit la passion des femmes!” unabashedly illustrate the sexual dynamic of their relationship. Mardrus may couch her love-making to Barney in verse, but her words evoking the tender and mysterious folds of beauty—the pink shell where women’s passion lives—clearly make reference to Barney’s genitalia. “Bouche intime” might initially be read as Barney’s mouth, but the following stanza makes clear the meaning when Mardrus writes, “Lorsque, pour t’adorer, nous plions le genou,/L’odeur de tout l’amour exalte nos narines,/Et, sous notre baiser, ton plaisir a le goût/Des goémons mouillés et des bêtes marines.” This poem’s reference to genital-bucal sex is much more descriptive or evocative than most discursive representations of lesbian lovemaking in the first decade of the twentieth century, and marks it as exceptional.

• 24 L. Delarue-Mardrus, Mes Mémoires, Paris, Gallimard, 1938, p. 144.
• 25 L. Delarue-Mardrus, L’Ange et les pervers, New York, New York University Press, 1995, p. 140.

14Although their love affair ended in 1903, they remained friends until Delarue-Mardrus’s death in 1945. Recalling years later her first meeting with Barney, Delarue-Mardrus wrote that they met at the theater in a shared loge, and that Barney “was, is, and will always be one of my dearest friends”24. In addition to her literary talent, Delarue-Mardrus was a celebrated beauty with her fair complexion, dark eyes, tall stature, and dark hair. Her fragile beauty certainly did not go unnoticed by Barney nor did Barney’s magnetic sexual appeal leave Delarue-Mardrus unphased. In a pattern that will be repeated with several of her great loves, Barney is not only her female prey’s first female seducer, but she is an erotic Rosetta stone through which ostensibly theretofore heterosexual women unlock the secrets of their own desire. The flip side of this behavior is that Barney’s incessant infidelities inevitably led to the end of her passionate affairs. Using Barney as a model for her character Laurette (coincidentally a diminutive of Barney’s sister’s name), Delarue-Mardrus depicts Barney as a rich self-centered but not unkind women who toyed with women and lived for seduction in a life woven around “idleness, wealth, and too many novels”25.

• 27 F. Rapazzini, “Elisabeth de Gramont-Tonnerre, Natalie Barney’s ‘Eternal Mate’,” in South Central Re (...)
• 28 While this article focuses on lesbian collaborations, it should be noted that Gramont was close fri (...)
• 29 For the publishing history of this short story see S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 199. It is referenced (...)
• 30 Ibid., p. 15.

17Elisabeth Gramont—latter Duchess de Clermont-Tonnere—entered Barney’s life as one of the most respected aristocratic ladies of France: a descendant of Henri IV, married to a Duke in 1896, mother of two, and the only woman with whom Barney made a marriage contract in which they famously stated that physical fidelity was not expected or normal27. In fact, it was none other than Lucie Delarue-Mardrus who introduced Gramont to Barney in 1910, and for several years she would remain Barney’s primary love interest. Their relationship would endure until Gramont’s death, and their shared lives influenced their creative lives for decades28. For instance, many scholars agree that Gramont was the model for Barney’s short story “The Woman that Lives With Me” in which Barney presumably writes of Gramont: “She came to me because her life was broken, and nothing mattered much”29. Barney would also later write two portraits of this great love: first a criticism of Gramont’s writings in Aventures de l’esprit (1929) and later in Souvenirs indiscrets where she pays homage to her departed partner’s character with the words “and with her went a certain lightness, a certain joie de vivre, and life lost one of its fiercest allies”30.

• 31 Ibid, p. 199.

18Likewise, Barney appears in Gramont’s memoires, specifically in “Years of Plenty” where she compliments Barney’s “bitter observations on the human soul in Pensées d’une Amazone” and then analyzes some of Barney’s most trenchant insights in her aphorisms31. While these are examples of their literary collaborations, which are central to discussions of queer collaborations, it is also important to discuss a very different type of their “collaborations” with historical significance.

• 32 A copy of the contract can be found at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, fonds Natalie Barney, NCB.C (...)

19In perhaps one of the most moving and salient examples of lesbians reconstituting the bourgeois rules of amorous relationships would be Natalie Barney’s and Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonerre’s marriage contract32. Their declaration of love and of mutual support memorialized as a “marriage contract” with no formal legal recognition under current French law is nonetheless striking in its realistic enumeration of the inherent pitfalls that they encountered in their romantic and loving relationship. Also remarkable is their willingness to acknowledge the soulful complementarity they experienced each in the other. This marriage contract that they signed in 1918 provides an intimate and historically important insight into the ways that two women reimagined a loving and committed relationship. It is an example of a queer collaboration at humankind’s very core: the search for another with whom one will weather life’s storms and share its joys. Eschewing traditionally held notions about what a committed relationship meant, these two women did not attach value of their relationship to notions of monogamy or to the imprimatur of a religious sacrament. In sharp contrast to contemporary ideals of marriage, both parties acknowledge and accept the other’s infidelities in an honest and unhypocritical manner. French literature of the nineteenth century was of course often preoccupied with notions of marriage and the family, with adultery being one of its privileged tropes.

• 33 Truman Capote, after visiting Brook’s studio in the 1940s, stated that it was “the all-time ultimat (...)
• 34 He called her a “cambrioleuse d’âmes.” A. Bertrand, Robert de Montesquiou, Paris, Classiques Garnie (...)

21The most enduring side of this amorous triangle was Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), whose relationship with Barney lasted over 50 years, until they were in their 90s. Like Barney, Brooks came from a wealthy American family and experienced an unhappy childhood. Brooks’ grandfather was the multi-millionaire industrialist who had made his money in the coal-mining industry. She spent many years in poverty as she refined her painting technique, but once she inherited her grandfather’s wealth at 28, she was an independently wealthy woman who spent most of her life in Paris and Capri whenever she was not traveling. As a painter, she was known for her portraiture of lesbian women and her use of almost monochromatic color33. Her 1910 exhibition in Paris established her as a recognized artistic talent, and writing of her paintings Robert de Montesquiou referred to her as the “thief of souls”34.

• 35 This portrait, titled “Portrait de Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), femme de lettres, dit ‘L’Am (...)
• 36 Acceptance into Barney’s salon required at least one of the following according to biographer Suzan (...)

22Although Barney and Brooks had intersecting circles of friends such as Ida Rubinstein and the Princesse de Polignac, they did not meet until sometime in 1916. Despite all of their years together, Brooks never inspired a novel, short story or poem by Barney, but she did remain a fixture in Barney’s life, part of the emotional and affective firmament that shaped Barney and her salon. On the other hand, one of Brook’s renowned paintings is of Natalie Barney as she sits at table with a book and a miniature horse perched atop of it, which clearly references Barney’s reputation as the Amazon35. As one critic has said of Brooks, she became a de facto court painter of an incomparable group of men and women, many of them queer, who made significant contributions to literature and art from around 1910 through 193036. Barney’s affective and creative lives may be inextricably bound together, but in the sequence of Bois de Boulogne to boudoir to the most important element stands Barney’s famous salon.

• 37 E. Jaloux, Les saisons littéraires (1904-1914), Paris, Librairie Plon 1950, p. 102.

23During the French Third Republic the process of queer collaboration and community building among certain socio-economic classes of women could be almost formulaic: from boudoir to bed to eventual text, but in Barney’s case another crucial component exists: her famous salon at 20 rue Jacob, where creative minds of all kinds and nationalities met, mingled, and often mated. One observer wrote “the universe came here from San Francisco to Japan, from Lima to Moscow, from London to Rome”37.

• 38 J. Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh, New York, Knopf, p. 138.
• 39 G. Wickes, Amazon of Letters, op. cit., p. 263.
• 40 M. Hawthorne, Women, op. cit.

25When these two women met in 1903 Colette was married to the writer, music critic, and bourgeois bon vivant, Henry “Willy” Gauthier-Villars, and the couple was riding high on the success of Colette’s Claudine series of novels—Claudine en ménage (Claudine Married) had just been published. In many ways still a bit of a rustic Burgundian rather than a polished Parisienne, but Barney had often spied Colette on her morning jaunts on horseback through the Bois de Boulogne. Certain pathways were notorious for lesbian cruising, in particular the “path of virtue”. It was during one of Barney’s daily rides that she saw not only the great courtesan and later her lover, Liane de Pougy, but she also first saw Colette as she walked her dog and cat—“a dog and cat who were shortly to acquire literary immortality in the Dialogues de bêtes”38. Apparently sidelong glances were exchanged, and Barney was shortly thereafter introduced to Colette and Willy at the salon of the Countess of Chabanne. Soon, Barney sought out Colette and Willy who were living a few doors down the street at 28 rue Jacob. Their friendship bloomed and lasted until Colette’s death in 1954, and famed American journalist, Janet Flanner wrote of Barney “I think that she was fonder of Colette than of any other woman in French society”39. During the final decade of the Belle Époque, Colette was a frequent guest at Barney’s salon, and she would continue to participate in events at Barney’s home for many years. In fact, Colette was part of Barney’s Académie des femmes where she not only gave readings but also performed scenes from her plays such as Chéri. Their admiration, respect, and affection was mutual, and when Barney had trouble returning to France at the end of World War II, Colette was one of her close friends that interceded on her behalf with diplomats at Quai d’Orsay—along with Lilly de Gramont40.

• 41 J. Chalon, Portraits of a Seductress, op. cit., p. 119-120.
• 42 Mathilde de Morny (1863-1944), daughter of the Duke de Morny, Napoleon III’s half-brother, and late (...)
• 43 J. Thurman, op. cit., p. 153.

26True to form, Barney had a brief sexual affair with Colette, and this light-hearted romantic interlude is evidenced in one the few surviving letters from their correspondence in which Colette writes “My husband kisses your hands, and me all the rest”41. Claude Pichois, one of Colette’s famous biographers hypothesizes that after Colette’s disastrous affair with Georgie Raoul-Duval a woman with whom both she and her husband had had an affair and who was the model for Rézi in Claudine en ménage, she was too sad to invest in a serious romantic relationship, but Barney knew how to turn their passion into a life-long friendship. When she separated from Willy, Colette briefly stayed with Barney before eventually living with her lesbian lover “Missy”—La Marquise de Belbœuf42. Even though Missy had quite the noble pedigree, she nonetheless very publicly flaunted contemporary gender and sexuality norms. One would think that she would have found a natural ally in Barney, but she allegedly despised Barney “for her Jewish origins and a fortune made in trade”43.

• 44 Colette, The Pure and the Impure, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, p. 97.
• 45 Ibid., p. 80.

27Through Barney, Colette met and befriended Renée Vivien. In Le Pur et l’impur (1932), one of Colette’s most seminal and well-known works, she dedicates an entire chapter to Vivien, giving the world a detailed description of her apartment with its cloying incense, candles, dark interior, Chinese masks, and buddhas. Despite their friendship, Colette’s description of Vivien two decades later is not entirely sympathetic. Colette says that “like all those that never use their strength to the limit, I am hostile to those that let life burn them out”44, but the impact of that friendship is equally clear as she affirms “there is not a single feature of her youthful face that I do not vividly recall. Everything in it bespoke childishness, roguishness, and the propensity to laughter. Impossible to find anywhere in that face, from the fair hair to the sweet dimple of that weak little chin that was not a line of laughter, any sign of the hidden tragic melancholy that throbs in the poetry of Renée Vivien45. Barney played a role in bringing these two creative talents together, and Colette’s and Vivien’s friendship was strong to the point that Colette and Willy, and later just Colette, visited Vivien at her rented villa in Nice in the last years before her tragic decline and death in 1909.

• 46 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 241.
• 47 N.C. Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets, Paris, Flammarion, 1960, p. 114.

28Undoubtedly, one would need a book to begin to unravel the intersections, connections, influences, and the romances involving Barney and a transatlantic coterie of cultural producers, both high and low. However, I do not want to suggest that the mixture of personalities, nationalities, and opinions was always easy at Barney’s salon or at times even successful. According to her longtime housekeeper, there were two clans—the Anglophone and the French—that rarely mixed46. Nevertheless, from Proust to Remy de Gourmont, from Isadora Duncan to Mata Hari, Colette to Regina Regis de Oliviera (A Brazilian Countess and writer), artists of all kinds of ethnicities and ideologies passed through Barney’s doors. In fact, the long friendship and public correspondence between Rémy de Gourmont and Barney in Le Mercure de France made her part of the cultural landscape in France, but it is only one more example among many. Gourmont and Barney had a deeply intellectual friendship that explored all facets of life, including philosophy, and he wrote to her that she was the “only person to whom he has submitted…intellectually.”47 Gourmont’s letters published in Le Mercure de France were an extension of their intimate conversations…his continuation of musings and contemplations sparked by their exchanges. The published letters appeared bimonthly from January 1, 1912 through October 1913, after which the 32 letters were published in book form.

• 48 R. de Gourmont, Lettres à l’Amazone, Paris, Mercure de France, 1927, p. 144.
• 49 Ibid., p. 45-53.
• 50 Ibid., p. 90-91. N.C. Barney, Adventures of the Mind, trans. John Spalding Gatton, New York, New Yo (...)

29Some of their published exchanges touched on questions of sexuality and certainly added to public discussions about queer sexualities. For instance, Gourmont made the bold statement in his letter entitled “Survivance” that “… dans l’amour tel que nous avons recréé par tant de siècles de civilisation, il n’est plus de distinction possible entre le naturel et l’anormal… nos centres nerveux secondaires se substituent l’un à l’autre nous aimons avec… celui de nos sens, celui de nos organes qui a le rôle le plus important dans notre physiologie particulière, si bien que, de l’amour mystique à l’amour saphique et à l’amour platonique, s’il y a la différence de moyen, il n’y en a pas dans le but, qui est la conquête de la joie parfaite48. In his letter entitled “Le Plaisir” Gourmont talks about the Amazon’s (Barney’s) élan towards beauty and love and their imbrication in physical pleasure—ideas which reinforced the idea of lesbians as sensualists and artists.49 Elsewhere, he talks about the commonalities between an Amazone’s love of women and heterosexual romance as in his letter entitled, “L’Amour nu”50.

• 51 “In Search of Miss Barney”, New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1969.
• 52 Colette performed scenes from the adaptation of La Vagabonde at Barney’s salon both in 1922 and in (...)
• 53 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 228.
• 54 Havet was referring to Count François-Guillaume Maigret.
• 55 M. Havet, Journal 1918-1919, ed. Pierre Plateau, Paris, Éditions Claire Paulhan, 2003, p. 83.
• 56 Later in the twentieth century the literary critic, Claude Mauriac affectionately referred to Barne (...)

30Asked in a 1960’s interview in The New York Times Book Review how she had created such a transnational salon, Barney replied “I was an international person myself, and as I had a nice house, I thought I should help other international people meet. Other literary salons were not international…I gave afternoons to French and American poets so that others could get to know themˮ51. One might first think of a salon as primarily devoted to discussions of literature and philosophy, but Barney’s salon was so much more. At 20 rue Jacob, one could expect a full range of artistic and creative presentations from music recitals and dances to poetry readings and plays52. Barney was quick to open her home to nurture and promote the works of those she deemed worthy, and it did not harm one’s cause if she were a woman that inflamed Barney’s erotic imagination. For instance, the Armenian refugee cum writer, Armen Ohanian, renowned for her “dance poems,” performed at Barney’s salon and briefly became her lover, which caused Gramont to shed “bitter tears”53. Ohanian, who went on to write several volumes of her memoires and married a Mexican diplomat, is but one example of the complex web of creative and romantic relationships fostered in Barney’s salon that was in effect a microcosm of cosmopolitanism. Even for lesser known or forgotten artists, Barney’s salon was both a creative crucible, cruising ground, and potential artistic launching pad. To underscore this point is Mireille Havet, the precocious child poet and lesbian, who described in her journal how Hélène Bertholet took advantage of Barney’s salon to approach Havet and express her interest in an affair with her. Bertholet was at the time involved in a heterosexual relationship with Maigret54, a Parisian socialite, but soon after meeting Havet they became lovers55. Havet’s access to salon society allowed her to find other lovers, among them Baronne Clauzel and Comtesse Sforza56.

• 57 Wickes writes that Stein was often seen at Barney’s salon “the permanent occupant of right wall cen (...)
• 58 S. Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 254.
• 59 Five of the twelve ladies described in Ladies Almanack had been Barney’s lovers, and ten of them we (...)
• 60 While Barney is more associated with her literary contributions, mentoring, and patronage of writer (...)

31Although, this issue of Sextant focuses on the time period of 1880 through 1920, I cannot forego mentioning that during the 1920s other recognizable names graced Barney’s salon. For instance, from the mid 1920s forward Gertrude Stein and Barney developed a warm friendship, and Stein was often at Barney’s salon57. Barney herself read passages of Stein’s The Making of Americans at her Académie des Femmes in an effort to introduce Stein’s work to influential literati and even translated them into French58. Djuna Barnes arrived in 1924 and quickly fell into Barney’s orbit. It was among those constant satellites in Barney’s salon on whom Djuna Barnes based her characters in her novel Ladies Almanach59. Barney became a life-long friend and patron of Barnes, and later in life gave her a stipend and small sum in her will. Other queer artists and writers such as poet Radclyffe Hall, Lady Una Troubridge, Thelma Wood, Anaïs Nin, and Eyre de Lanux frequented Barney’s salons when in Paris60. They were part of a literary and artistic network of intertexuality and referentiality that came from the demi-monde, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy, and whose sum total offered a consistent transnational dimension: Americans, English, French, Romanian, or other, Barney’s salon was the epicenter for a Sapphic sisterhood of creative women.

• 61 J. Schenkar, Truly Wilde, op. cit., p. 12.

33During the Belle Epoque and into the Roaring Twenties, Paris became the epicenter of lesbian visibility and artistic expression, and for much of that time the ex-patriot Natalie Barney was a centrifugal force in its composition. Her centrality in the creation of Paris-Lesbos is much too complex to even outline in such a brief article, and I have had to elide her patronage of many, her Académie des femmes, and other key components of her place in queer history. However, what I hoped to make clear is that her legacy is more than her own literary œuvre and legend, as Barney’s was a life that influenced and shaped the creative trajectories and sometimes hearts of numerous other queer authors such as Jean Cocteau and André Gide, Colette, and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, to artists such as Romaine Brooks, Marie Laurencin, and Man Ray. If Barney’s assertion that “the most beautiful thing in life is creating oneself, not in procreation,” then Barney was more successful than many realize. She spent a lifetime creating and recreating herself and her legacy, and also developed some of the most influential and productive queer networks on both sides of the Atlantic. Barney believed in women, and this was perhaps never clearer than when she created her Académie des femmes in 1927 where women artists such as Colette, Stein, and Rachilde were honored. She once said that “love and friendship” would be her religion, and she lived that faith with great devotion. Underpinning many of her initially amorous relationships was Barney’s great belief in friendship, which led her to comment, “I think friendship is the most lasting, and the freest of passing emotions. I’ve never given up my friends. They’ve given me up, but I’ve never given them up”. The importance of Barney’s collaborations, romances, and creative nurturing, provide some of the most revealing historical records of lesbian community formation from the Belle Epoque through the Interwar years. While Barney embodied a lesbian literary crossroads where romance and text were mutually generative and often intertwined, her salon became a beacon for a transnational creative coalition of queer artists to explore art, literature, and themselves, which raises the question: was it “…quite simply, the most subversive literary salon that ever existed?”61