My Blue Notebooks PA The Intimate... | Buy

Liane de Pougy, known as Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesan, was a Folies-Bergère dancer who became a princess and died a nun. Between 1919 and 1941 she wrote her intimate memoir, My Blue Notebooks. Making modern tell-alls seem downright tepid by comparison, this long-out-of-print classic is a fascinating look into the mind of an audacious woman of great intelligence and humor. In My Blue Notebooks, de Pougy describes hosting the likes of Jean Cocteau and the poet Max Jacob, her best friend ("Never again. Never more than one writer at a time"). She shares her literary critiques of her "friend" Colette ("I look down on her with a grimace of disgust"), recalls the funeral of Nicholas I (she happened to be in St. Petersburg at the time), and reports the sad early death of her acquaintance Marcel Proust. She writes graphically of her many sexual liaisons with both men and women, including her complex marriage to the "too handsome" Prince Georges Ghika of Romania and her difficult relationship with Nathalie Clifford Barney, perhaps the real love of her life. Here is a voyeuristic feast of high society living during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Liane De Pougy, born in 1869, retired from her scandalous life in 1910 to marry a prince. After her husband's death in the mid-1940s, she became a nun and spent the rest of her life as Sister Anne-Marie. She died in 1950.

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1919Saint-Germain-en-Laye-July 1 to September 10 July 1.I have been reading Marie Bashkirtseff's life, or rather her journal. It touched me to the heart and here I am, carried away to the point of longing to write my own. My husband is delighted. Our friend Salomon Reinach is also urging me on. Marie Bashkirtseff, that little girl who died long ago and who throbbed with such a feverish passion for life in all its forms and above all for fame-she haunts and inspires me. But my journal could never be like hers. She was an innocent girl...and who am I? Princess Georges Ghika, born Anne-Marie Olympe Chassaigne and then put together from Madame Armand Pourpe and the notorious Liane de Pougy. She had a thorough, well-planned education; I had six years in a convent and heaven knows how many of experience picked up at random. July 2. It is my birthday. I was born on July the 2nd, 18-. Look it up in the parish register of La Fleche (Sarthe). Maman was on a visit to some military friends. She was not expecting me to arrive before August 15th. Why? Simply because the Holy Virgin had appeared to her in a dream, sitting in a beautiful white cherry tree, and told her: 'You will have a little daughter on my feast day. She will be called Marie. I will protect her. After an eventful life she will end up in Paradise as a great saint.' Maman said later: 'July 2nd is the Visitation. It's the most important of the Virgin's feasts so the dream came true.' Maman was very pious, half Spanish on her father's side. At the time of my birth she was forty-three and a half years old. She had gone to see my brother Emmanuel who was a pupil at the Military School of La Fleche, and had dropped in on her good friends the Chapelains. What a visit! A baby popping into their arms without warningand into the arms of a most delicious neighbour about whom I will have more to say! Madame Navarre, nee Atala de Monpeyssin, a creole from Martinique who became a sort of second mother to me during my early childhood. Because I couldn't pronounce the name Atala I called her Maman Lala......... Maman Lala has been dead for some time now; she became the friend of the timid little girl I was, taking me for walks on Sundays, stuffing me with coconut, guava jelly and sugar candy dipped in the rum of her beautiful homeland, about which she told me such fabulous and amazing stories. Maman Lala always took me to her house on public holidays and when my brothers and their friends were home from school, to rescue me from their rough games. She did the most exquisite embroidery on linen, making dresses of it for her spoilt little 'Poupette'. I remember, too, that she used to say her prayers aloud, very loud, and that she would scold the saints and perhaps even God Himself if they weren't answered. I adored her. How bitterly I cried, the night when my parents thought I was asleep and I overheard them saying that she was going blind. I left her when I was eight years old. Floods of tears, cruel grief. Then, when I was sixteen, I took my husband Armand Pourpe to introduce him to her. Seeing me again after such a long time, she said; 'My little darling, do you still have yo' teet' of pearl and yo' coral nail?' Then, in a whisper: 'Yo' husban' look too husbandish!' I saw her twice more after that. I showed her a fiancewho only half pleased her and pleased me even lessa stiff, narrow Englishman with whom I broke once I had thought it over properly. And then I went to embrace her a week before she died. She made me swear that I would never go on the metrothere had just been a fearful accident on itand I have kept my word. July 3.Young heart, young face, but the years are here, the aches and pains, the sorrows, the empty spaces...Oh, my dear departed ones! My brother Emmanuel died in 1886 (Lieutenant in the marine infantry, killed at Tonkin); my father (retired Captain in the