OUT OF PRINT!

MY BLUE NOTEBOOKS by Liane de Pougy, Penguin Putman, Inc. 1979, 283 pages. 

Out of print books are recyclable and inexpensive. If you don’t mind reading on a screen, they can be downloaded for free. No virtual strings attached. 

Everyone said she was beautiful. Everyone in Paris’s Belle Époch (1871-1914) knew her as the most admired courtesan and a dancer at the Folies Bergere. But Liane de Pougy is first to admit she had few talents (other than, of course, that of courtesan), and tells of her unsuccessful acting lessons with Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt gave up on her after six lessons with the advice: “when you’re on stage keep your pretty mouth shut.” 

There’s a kind of unexpected arc that runs throughout the book: Liane struggles with Christianity and longs to be a believer. She prays to accept Jesus into her life, but admits she’s bothered by the fact that he’s a man, as she doesn’t think so highly of the gender. Liane had affairs with men and women, most famously the celebrated American lesbian heiress Natalie Clifford Barney who she claims was the love of her life. But she was as quick to abandon as she was to love, Natalie included. As for the bedroom reveal, she shares: “Natalie celebrates my body down to the waist. That is all I allow myself to grant. “ The rest she says belongs to her husband Georges. He saved her from further infamy when he married her. A not-so-rich Romanian prince and scandalously twelve years younger, he boosted her to the near-top of the titled social ladder, because high society never fully accepted a former courtesan. 

Liane knew many of the important people of the age. Her eagle-eyed observations of Jean Cocteau, Coco Channel, Max Jacob, Marcel Proust and others are revealing high points. She visits Cocteau in Toulon when he’s on an opium binge, complains about the workmanship of the Paul Poiret dresses she buys and complains about Poiret too. Of Coco Chanel she says, “the taste of a fairy, the eyes and voice of a woman, the hair-cut and figure of an urchin.”

Liane spent the last years of her life in Lausanne where she found her calling as a Dominican tertiary, pursuing religious practice but not living at a convent or taking a nun’s vows.There she spent time with the nuns and helped care for children with mental health conditions and disabilities. She took up the cause with fervor, donated money, and called on her wealthy acquaintances like Coco Chanel for contributions. Chanel, she said, donated a very generous amount. 

My Blue Notebooks span the years 1919-1941. Liane writes that if anyone wants to destroy the memoirs, she approves, and if anyone wants to publish them “in all their horrors to benefit some straying soul, I approve.”  By her own account, Liane  was a fair weather friend, a negligent mother, often an indifferent wife. But throughout tragedy and triumph, she had the even keel of a pragmatist. And the hard-won wisdom granted to women who sell their bodies. 

Available for purchase on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Notebooks-Beautiful-Notorious-Courtesan/dp/1585421561

Also available on Kindle for $3.99.