The Women in Her Life
By the time Judith’s husband caught wind of their affair, Olga de Moraes Sarmento (May 26, 1881–December 1948) was already a center of Portuguese lesbian life. She had founded a literary review, Sociedade futura (Future Society), and had been featured on the masthead since its first issue (May 1, 1902).[1] For those in the know, the publication’s title clearly alluded to the Chansons de Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis), a volume of erotic prose poems by Pierre Louÿs, who claimed to have translated them from the Greek. Although the first (limited) edition (1895) was dedicated to André Gide, the title page of subsequent editions was inscribed: “Ce petit livre d’amour antique est dédié respectueusement aux jeunes filles de la société future” (This little book of antique love is respectfully dedicated to the young ladies of the future society).[2] On May 18, 1906, she spoke on the “Problema feminista” (“Feminist Problem”) at the Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa (Geography Society of Lisbon).[3]
Much of what we know today of Olga’s life is drawn from her own account, As minhas memórias (Tempo passato, tempo amato…), which she began in New York in October 1942 and broke off in January 1948 due to ill health. The book is dedicated to her life-partner:
em homenagem
da minha ternura agradecida,
da minha admiração sempre fiel,
da minha saudade inconsolável.
A HELENA
ofereço estas páginas que são o pálido retrato da minha vida, essa vida em que ela foi, pela nobreça inigualável da sua alma, pela inteligência compreensiva da sua amizade, pela generosidade calorosa do seu coração, a grande luz maternal que soube iluminar e aquecer mais de trinta anos de uma dedicação perfeita.[4]
in homage
from my thankful tenderness,
from my forever faithful admiration,
from my inconsolable longing.
TO HÉLÈNE
I offer these pages, the pale reflection of my life, that life in which she was, by the matchless nobility of her soul, by the sympathetic intelligence of her friendship, by the sincere generosity of her heart, the great mother-light that illuminated and warmed over thirty years with her perfect dedication.
The Baroness Hélène van Zuylen van Nijevelt van de Haar, née de Rothschild (21 August 1863 – 17 October 1947), though a member of the famous Jewish banking family, had married a Roman Catholic, the Baron Etienne van Zuylen on August 16, 1887. In July 1898, under the pseudonym “Snail,” she became the first woman motorist to compete in an international race: the Paris–Amsterdam–Paris Trail.[5] She was also the lover of the poet Pauline Tarn (11 June 1877 – 18 November 1909), who published most famously as Renée Vivien but also as R. Vivien, Paule Riversdale, and once as Pauline Mary Tarn. Hélène, too, published several volumes (plays, poems, novels, and short stories) from 1904 to 1914, under her own name.[6] It is possible that “Paule Riversdale” may have been a collaboration between Pauline and Hélène—or that the works attributed to Hélène may have been composed by Pauline alone.[7]
The youngest of five siblings, Olga was born in Setúbal and raised first in Elvas, later in Lisbon. Her mother, Júlia, was the daughter of a division general, Higino de Moraes Sarmento; her father, Francisco de Moraes, was then a lieutenant.[8] Olga would later recall him as “alto, imponente . . . impecável na elegância da sua farda” (tal, imposing . . . impeccable in the elegance of his attire).[9] He ruled his household with an iron fist:
Para mim e para os meus irmãos, aquela atmosfera de disciplina que ele irradiava era fonte de permanente ansiedade; inspirava-nos uma espécie de terror sem perigo. Quando ele chegava a casa, sentíamos menos livre a respiração. . .[10]
For me and for my siblings, the atmosphere of discipline he irradiated was a source of permanent anxiety; he inspired us with a species of terror without danger. When he came home, we breathed less freely.
By the time Olga was twelve years old, her father had at least one other child by another woman. When his wife, Olga’s mother, refused to allow him to bring that child into their home, he called Olga and her siblings into the hallway and offered them a choice: to follow him out of the house forever or to suffer the “consequências” (consequences). Of all the children, Olga alone chose to stay with her mother.[11]
Before her affair with Judith or her relationship with Hélène, Olga was married to a man: Manuel João da Silveira, eleven years her senior.[12] When they first met, he was studying medicine while serving as a cadet; by the time they married, he had become a second lieutenant in the Royal Navy and she was seventeen and a half years old.[13] Six months after their wedding, her husband was deployed to a warship near the Portugese port of Luanda, which had been the center of the transatlantic slave trade from its mid-sixteenth-century founding until 1867, well after the Portuguese government had outlawed the “export” of enslaved people.[14] Olga, who was too young to be left in Lisbon on her own, spent the next two years in the Azores with her sister Laura, whose husband was then serving as a colonel.[15]
It was while exploring the archipelago that Olga began to write, using a number of pseudonyms.[16] Olga would later credit her husband with allowing her to realize “um sonho em que quase não ousava pensar” (a dream I had hardly dared to think of)—founding a literary review. At the time, she added, such a thing was “incompreensível, nunca vista, uma espécie de vasto terramoto, pois traduzia não só ousadia inacreditável—como perigosa ameaça de emancipação” (inconceivable, unheard-of, a species of vast earthquake, since it betrayed not only unbelievable daring—but also the perilous menace of emancipation).[17] If true, this indicates that Manuel João da Silveira may have harbored extraordinarily liberal views with respect to women—or at least a real affection for his wife. At the same time, it is worth asking whether the real impetus to found a review came not from Olga’s husband but from Judith, who would—twenty-two years later—found a review of her own: Europa.[18] Without providing the date of her husband’s death, Olga’s memoir mentions that he died “heróicamente” (heroically) in Angola, at age thirty-four, when she herself was twenty-three years old.[19] If his year of death was 1904, he might well have been killed in the battle of the Cunene River (25 September), when the Kwamoto resoundingly defeated a Portuguese force of at least 2,000 men, including 500 officers.[20]
Further research is needed to determine the duration of Judith and Olga’s relationship. Thanks to the records of Jayme’s divorce proceedings, we know that Judith and Olga were probably having sex by the fall of 1910 and certainly before the end of 1911. They might well have been seeing each other years earlier, since Judith was already in Lisbon by 1907. We also know that Olga departed for France in 1911 or early 1912. If, as Olga claims in the dedication of her memoirs, her relationship with Hélène lasted thirty years until the latter’s death in 1947, Olga and Hélène would have been a couple by around 1917. Hélène had a reputation for jealousy. According to a 1932 account by the novelist Colette, whose house and garden on the rue de Villejust was situated next door to Pauline Tarn’s on the avenue du Bois, that jealousy was murderous. Once, when Colette visited Pauline at home, she found her pale and trembling in the bathroom, terrified that Hélène would abduct and kill her by means too horrifying to be described in print. Hélène, moreover, could not be deceived: “Avec elle je n’ose pas simuler ni mentir, parce qu’elle met à ce moment-là son oreille sur mon cœur” (With her I dare not simulate or lie, since she places her ear upon my heart at that very moment).[21] Natalie Barney, the poet, writer, and patron of the arts who was Pauline’s lover from 1900 to 1901, eloped with her to Lesvós in 1904, and struggled to win her back until her early death in 1909, gives a similar account in her 1960 recollections. After an idyllic month with Natalie at Mytilene, Pauline received a letter from Hélène and informed Natalie that she could not hide and had no choice but to return: “Elle alerterait les consulats, la police secrète du monde entier. Son pouvoir comme sa fortune est illimité” (She would alert the consulates, the secret police everywhere in the world. Her power, like her fortune, is unlimited).[22] Colette, who disliked Pauline, and Barney, the jilted lover, had no incentive to tell the truth. Still, if even part of these stories are to be believed, it is unlikely that Olga could have continued to see Judith for more than a few weeks at a time after she had committed herself to Hélène.
This timeline implies a gap in the biographies of Pauline Tarn and Hélène van Zuylen. In his 1986 biography of Renée Vivien, Jean-Paul Goujon concluded—based on a single letter from Pauline Tarn (signed “Paul”) to Natalie Barney (“Tout-Petit”), in which Pauline complains that Hélène has seen a woman called “Sacha”—that Hélène’s new love interest was Alexandra Antokolsky, also called Sacha Ricoÿ and the Duchess of Sforza.[23] More recently, Julie Oliveira da Silva has mentioned Olga de Moraes Sarmento as a lover of Hélène.[24] But given Hélène’s jealousy, how could Olga have been partnered with Hélène while also seeing Judith in 1911? Did Hélène leave Pauline for Sacha, Olga, or a different woman entirely, a woman who is so far unidentified? Was Olga seeing Hélène from, say, 1906 to 1910, only to break off their relationship temporarily for Judith?
Did Judith become seriously involved with any other women? The answer is probably yes. In the three poetry collections Judith is known to have published in her lifetime, each poem is followed by a brief inscription offering not only the year of composition but the month, season, time of day, and/or atmospheric conditions. The earliest love poem, “Madrugadas” (“Mornings”), which offers no clue as to the addressee’s gender, is dated to “Na Serra – Maio – Hora Intensa / 919” (“In the mountains, May, intense moment. 1919”).[25] Judith Teixeira’s first and third books, Decadencia(Decadence) (1923) and Núa: Poemas de Bysâncio (Nude: Poems of Byzantium) (1926), include a total of eleven poems whose addressees are clearly identified as women other than the speaker herself, here arranged in roughly chronological order:
Year
Month
Title
Citation
1921
August
“Flores de Cactus”
(“Cactus Flowers”)
Decadencia, 21–22
1922
February
“A Estatua”
(“The Statue”)
Decadencia, 15–16
1922
May
“A Cigana”
(“The Gypsy”)
Decadencia, 27–28
1922
June
“A Minha Amante”
(“My Lover”)
Decadencia, 61–62
1922
Summer
“Venere Coricata”
(“Venere Coricata”)
Decadencia, 67
1922
October
“A Mulher do Vestido Encarnado”
(“Woman in the Scarlet Dress”)
Decadencia, 73–74
1922
November
“Perfis decadentes”
(“Decadent Profiles”)
Decadencia, 31–32
1925
August
“Ilusão”
(“Illusion”)
Núa, 21–23
1925
Fall
“O fumo do meu cigarro”
(“The Smoke from My Cigarette”)
Núa, 25–27
1925
--
“A Bailarina vermelha”
(“Scarlet Dancer”)
Núa, 29–31
1925
--
“A Infanta das mãos pálidas”
(“Princess with Pale Hands”)
Núa, 49–50
Four possibilities spring immediately to mind: (a) Judith was in a relationship with another woman, whose identity is still unknown to us, for whom she wrote some or all of these poems; (b) Judith and Olga had found a way to see each other sporadically despite Hélène’s jealousy, and some or all of these poems are written to Olga; (c) Judith missed Olga desperately and wrote some or all of these poems out of frustrated desire for her; (4) the years are incorrect, whether because Judith misdated her poems deliberately or because the typesetters at one or both publishing houses did so in error. Thanks to the notebook of Judith Teixeira’s handwritten drafts, there is evidence to suggest that Judith Teixeira did occasionally change the dating of her poems.[26]
Two poems in the notebook are inscribed—perhaps to Judith’s other lovers? The first dedicatee, Isabel Gamito, published a sonnet in the first issue of Judith Teixeira’s literary review and, three years later, a book of her own poems.[27] Its contents are religious, pastoral, and utterly conventional. By that time, however, Portugal was ruled by the conservative Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) that would become the Estado Novo (New State) in 1933. If Gamito did write any erotic poems, especially relating to bisexuality or lesbianism, she would have been protecting herself and those close to her by omitting them from the volume.
The second inscription, though partly illegible, may refer to another woman writer: Cacilda de Castro.[28] Her published works include a verse monologue, A bébé e a boneca (The Baby and the Doll) (1898); a short story collection, Silhuetas (Silhouettes) (1901), published when she was fifteen years old; a boy’s monologue, A caricatura (The Caricature) (1901); a one-act play, Merlim e Veviana (Merlin and Viviane), commissioned by the actor Adelina Abranches and performed in 1911; two other plays, Esta mascara (This Mask) and Manhã de neve (Snowy Morning), both performed in 1912; political pieces, which even appeared in a journal, Portugal, that did not normally work with women; and at least four poems, which appeared in journals and an anthology of women poets.[29] As Cláudia Pazos Alonso observes, further research is needed to determine whether Judith, Isabel, and Cacilda were lovers or only friends and colleagues.[30]
Was the Júlia de Moraes Sarmento who rode around Lisbon with Judith and company Olga’s mother or her sister? Was she a chaperone or a participant? Except for Laura, the names and genders of Olga’s four legitimate siblings are unknown.[31] Olga mentions, in passing, that some or all of them began their studies after the family moved to Lisbon, which suggests that she had at least one brother.[32] If there was another sister, she might well have been named Júlia de Moraes Sarmento. As for the second question, the witnesses at the Azancot trial were servants who had been summoned to testify on behalf of their employer—and, in one case, a brother-in-law testifying against his sister-in-law. If any of them had known for certain that Judith had made love with not one but both of the Moraes Sarmento ladies, none would have hesitated to say so. And yet even the witness who claimed to have seen Judith and Alvaro in the act confined himself to mere insinuations with respect to Olga and Júlia. At the same time, millennia of prohibitions have never succeeded in preventing humans from engaging in sexual practices that either harm their fellow creatures or simply challenge convention. There is ample historical and sociological evidence, despite our search for “good representation,” that some lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people have done such things.[33] Opponents of incest might hope that Júlia and Olga were not sharing a bed or swapping sexual partners. But we cannot yet rule out that possibility.
Notes
[1] Sociedade futura 1 (May 1, 1902): 1. Digitized at https://pt.revistasdeideias.net/pt-pt/sociedade-futura.
[2] P[ierre] L[ouÿs], Les chansons de Bilitis (Paris, 1895), 5; Pierre Louÿs, Les chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1900). See also Tama Lea Engelking, “Translating the Lesbian Writer: Pierre Louÿs, Natalie Barney, and ‘Girls of the Future Society’,” South Central Review 22, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 62–77.
[3] Olga de Moraes Sarmento (as Olga Moraes Sarmento da Silveira), Problema feminista (Lisbon, 1906).
[4] Olga de Moraes Sarmento (as Olga Moraes Sarmento), As minhas memórias (Tempo passato, tempo amato…) (Lisbon: Portugália, n.d.).
[5] “Hélène Betty Louise Caroline de Rothschild (1863–1947),” The Rothschild Archive, https://family.rothschildarchive.org/people/91-helene-betty-louise-caroline-de-rothschild-1863-1947.
[6] Hélène van Zuylen van Nijevelt (as Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt): Copeaux (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1904), Effeullements (Paris: Alphonse Lemerrre, 1904), L’impossible sincérité (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1905), Le chemin du souvenir (Paris: F. Juven, 1907), L’inoubliée (Paris: E. Sansot, 1910), La dernière étreinte (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1912), L’enjôleuse (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1914).
[7] The known volumes signed Paule Riversdale are: Echos et reflets (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1903), Vers l’amour (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1903), Netsuké (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1904), L’être double (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1904). On Paule Riversdale’s identity, see Héra Mirtel, La vie moderne, 31 July 1910, cited in Patrizia Izquerido, “Renée Vivien, une ironiste méconnue,” Renée Vivien, une femme de lettres entre deux siècles (1877–1909), ed. Nicole Albert and Brigitte Rollet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2023), note 28 (p. 59); Camille Islert, “Une écriture en partage? Sur quelques renvois textuels entre Renée Vivien et Natalie Barney,” Sextant 40 (2023): 1; Melanie Hawthorne, Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 61–62.
[8] Olga de Moraes Sarmento, As minhas memórias, 16.
[9] As minhas memórias, 17.
[10] As minhas memórias, 18.
[11] As minhas memórias, 38–39.
[12] As minhas memórias, 47, 50.
[13] As minhas memórias, 47, 51.
[14] As minhas memórias, 51; Vanessa S. Oliveira, Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), 10, 12, 55–62.
[15] As minhas memórias, 51. Laura’s husband, Colonel Melo e Simas, would later become a senator and Minister of Education.
[16] As minhas memórias, 51–53.
[17] As minhas memórias, 54–55.
[18] Three issues of Europa survive: April, May, and June of 1925.
[19] As minhas memórias, 50.
[20] Hugo Silveira Pereira, “Witnessing Colonial Warfare in Early 20th-Century Portugal: The Photographic Reportage of the Kwamoto Campaign in South Angola (1907),” International Journal of Military History and Historiography 45 (2025): 61–91, esp. 64–65.
[21] Colette, Le pur et l’impur (Paris: Hachette, 2019), 79, 90.
[22] Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), Souvenirs indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), 82.
[23] Quoted, without date or provenance, in Jean-Paul Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses: Vie de Renée Vivien (Paris: Régine Deforges, 1986), 357–60. The letter has been edited by Chantal Bigot and Francesco Rapazzini in Renée Vivien, Je suis tienne irrévocablement: Lettres à Natalie C. Barney (Paris: Bartillat, 2023), no. 189 (pp. 245–46). Until now, this letter seems to have been unavailable to researchers because it was not in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet or in the family archives of Renée Vivien. It is unclear how the letter came into the papers of Claude Pichois, which are held by the Société des Amis de Colette.
[24] Julie Oliveira da Silva, “Dos arquivos invisíveis de escritoras sáficas: O caso de Renée Vivien, Judith Teixeira, e Eunice Peregrina de Caldas,” Convergência Lusíada 34, no. 50 (July/December 2023): 82–121, esp. 100–101.
[25] Judith Teixeira, “Madrugadas,” Decadencia, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Libanio da Silva, 1923), 63.
[26] Cláudia Pazos Alonso, “Um caderno com poemas inéditos de Judith Teixeira,” 211 (notes 1 and 2).
[27] “Um caderno com poemas inéditos de Judith Teixeira,” 213; Maria Isabel Gamito, “A ideia,” Europa 1, no. 1 (April 1925): n.p.; Maria Isabel Gamito, Nas serranias da vida (Lisbon: J. Rodrigues, 1928).
[28] “Um caderno com poemas inéditos de Judith Teixeira,” 213–14.
[29] Cited in Nuno Catharino Cardoso, Poetisas portugesas: Antologia contendo dados bibliograficos e biograficos acêrca de cento e seis poetisas (Lisbon, 1917), 104–8. See also Cacilda de Castro, A bébé e a boneca: Monólogo em verso (Lisbon: Arnaldo Bordalo, 1898), A caricatura: Monólogo para rapaz (1901), Silhuetas (Lisbon: Libanio da Silva, 1901), Merlim e Veviana: Acto em verso (Lisbon: Cernadas, 1911), Manhã de neve: Peça num acto em verso (Lisbon: Livraria Brasileira, 19--), and “Era um Santo!” Voz de S. Antonio 8, no. 1 (January 1902): 407.
[30] Pazos Alonso, “Um caderno com poemas inéditos de Judith Teixeira,” 214.
[31] As minhas memórias, p. 51.
[32] As minhas memórias, p. 37. The word “irmão,” in its masculine singular form, is a brother, while “irmã,” the feminine singular, is a sister, and “irmãs,” the feminine plural, are sisters. The masculine plural “irmãos,” as is the rule in Romance languages, can refer either to an entirely masculine group, i.e., only brothers, or to a group that is both feminine and masculine, i.e., any number of sisters and at least one brother.
[33] See, for example, the lives of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), aunt and niece, who formed an incestuous couple and wrote under the pen name “Michael Field”; Catalina (or Catalino) de Erauso, the sixteenth-century “lieutenant nun” who lived as a man, killing his own brother along the way; and (more recently) the lesbian who abuses the narrator of Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2019), as well as the bibliography on queer domestic abuse in the Afterword (245–47). Though it may not be as troubling to modern readers, Emily Dickinson’s romantic and possibly sexual relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, would have been incest by affiliation rather than consanguinity.