Natalie Barney’s Sonnet
At some point, Natalie must have learned of Eva’s suspension. We do not know when; we do not know how; and we do not know from whom. We have yet to uncover any reference to Bryn Mawr in Natalie’s correspondence before 1899, when she was seriously involved in a very public affair with Liane de Pougy.
Natalie’s fury, on hearing the news that Eva’s studies had been thwarted by Thomas—a middle-class Quaker from Pennsylvania, of a type that Natalie at her most uncharitable would have considered subaltern—can only be imagined. Natalie loved Eva. She believed in her with all her heart.[1] Like Natalie, Eva was young, beautiful, clever, talented, and rich. It may even have been no secret to Natalie that Eva had been considering a life at Bryn Mawr. Their parents were friends, and they regularly shared family news. Natalie would have strained to understand how Eva’s ambitions could have been derailed.
Then the Hodder scandal broke in Paris. It was the summer of 1899, when Natalie was spending the summer in Dinard, a fashionable seaside resort in Brittany. Her relationship with Liane was at a fever pitch. It is possible that Liane spread the news to Natalie. To develop and maintain her book of business, Liane needed to know everything. Access to information—and the quality of that information—affected her bottom line. Where would she have heard the news?
The Hodder scandal, like all the latest American gossip, was hot on the lips of guests at the Villa Trianon in Versailles, where Elisabeth (“Bessy”) Marbury had been building her reputation on the continent by holding a very queer literary salon over the past two years. The American Marbury was a spectacularly successful businesswoman. As the world’s leading writers’ representative, she counted among her clients Alphonse Daudet and the entire body of the Académie Française.[2] Other notable clients were Oscar Wilde and Clyde Fitch (the playwright who adapted Daudet’s Sapho). She was on a first-name basis with Sarah Bernhardt, who called her Marbury. Like Bernhardt and Liane de Pougy, Marbury knew everybody there was to know. Marbury lived in a lesbian relationship with actor Elsie de Wolfe.[3] Marbury and De Wolfe attracted lesbian gossip, and it spread like wildfire in her circles. The couple crossed the Atlantic several times a year, brokering deals. It is just as likely that Natalie learned the news from Marbury’s landlord in Versailles, Minnie Anglesey.[4] Or from a dozen other possible conduits. But of all the likely suspects, Liane de Pougy seems the most likely to have taken an interest in passing on the gossip to Natalie.
From Liane’s lips to Natalie’s ears. Liane was drafting a new novel that mined every salacious detail of her daily life with Natalie. She may have realized sapphic stories had market potential in this historical moment. In 1897, the prima donna Emma Calvé (a very close friend of the Palmers) had performed the lead role in Jules Massenet’s Sapho, an opera adapted from Daudet’s novel, in Paris. Full-page news stories began with the first rehearsal and appeared as far away as Los Angeles.[5] By 1899, it was clear that the Sappho craze was approaching critical mass. News broke that actress Eugénie Blair was attempting to preempt Olga Nethersole’s production of Sapho with a pirated adaptation of Daudet’s novel.[6] Even while Nethersole’s play was opening in New York, another unauthorized production was in the works in Baltimore.[7]
For once, Liane found herself in the position of being able to capitalize on her sensational private life without compromising her clients. When she was not serving her clients or living out operatic scenes with Natalie, Liane was in her boudoir with pen in hand. With Liane distracted, Natalie would have had all the time in the world to ruminate on what had happened to Eva at Bryn Mawr.
Natalie’s rage found a new target: Mamie Gwinn, whom gossip cast as the temptress of the Hodder scandal. Could Mamie Gwinn have tempted Eva too? How could Gwinn have failed to see Eva’s greatness? And if she did see it, how could she have failed to protect her?
Natalie would always take up her pen to defend Eva.[8] It is most likely during the summer of 1899, or at any rate before she met Pauline Tarn in November, that Natalie began drafting a sonnet-portrait addressed to a mysterious“Mlle M. G.,” with pointed references to Eva Palmer:
Non, tu n’as rien de la rigueur antique,
Ton âme est un discord mélodieux
Planant plus haut que les lois et les dieux,
Dans un mépris pour le simple classique.
Ta beauté veut le mystique gothique,
Tu hais la Forme et la Ligne, et les lieux
Où l’ombre cède au jour audacieux,
Dardant sans art ses lumières obliques.
C’est toi l’amoureuse d’un siècle éteint,
Et tes grands yeux lassés cherchent sans fin
Des lambeaux de rêve en ce banal monde.
Tes traits perdus ont l’amère douceur,
Sadiquement ils contemplent l’Immonde,
Souriant au mal par qui tu te meurs.[9]
You lack the rigor of antiquity—
your soul is a melodious discórd
soaring higher than laws and gods,
scorning classical simplicity.
Your beauty wants the Gothic’s mystic rite;
you hate both Line and Form, and every place
where shadow gives way to fearless day,
artlessly darting its slanting light.
You are the lover of a time gone by,
and your wide, weary eyes forever seek
some shreds of dreaming in this banal world.
Your wasted features are bitter and sweet—
sadistically they contemplate the Dirt,
smiling at the pain from which you’ll die.[10]
M. G. lacks the rigor of ancient Greece; the simplicity of the classical aesthetic is not for her. She favors the Gothic, the medieval, the chiaroscuro. She is in love with a vanished world, despite the sordid time and place in which she finds herself. Her own beauty is fading. Eventually she, too, will pass away.
In nineteenth- and twentieth-century terms, this is a condemnation. The age of Pericles was widely viewed as the pinnacle of Western civilization. Medieval Europe was all very well for romance novels and Grand Tour itineraries, but everyone knew the “Dark Ages” could not hold a candle to Classical Antiquity. Even the champion of Gothic architecture, John Ruskin, included “savageness,” “grotesqueness,” “rigidity,” and “redundance” among its “moral elements.”[11] If M. G. preferred the medieval to the classical, she was guilty of bad taste.
And not only that. Seeking heights beyond “all laws and gods” was a sign of what the scholars of Barney’s day would have called (in a misreading of the Greek) hubris.[12] Hubris was arrogance—the arrogance that prompted bad decisions. Hubris led not only to the downfall of leaders but also to everyone in their care. Barney’s poem is deeply personal; it is neither derivative, nor is it about love.
The contrasts at play—medieval and classical, past and present, love and hate—make sense if we imagine the poem as attacking Mamie Gwinn and praising Eva Palmer. Eva was already studying classical Greek; Gwinn’s specialty was medieval English literature.[13] The poem charges Mamie Gwinn with lacking the intellectual and moral rigor to appreciate Eva or to stand up for her. The hypocrisy lies in the lawbreaking. Known all her life for her paradoxes, Natalie Barney sets up two laws, a lower and a higher. While Barney may well be praising Gwinn for breaking the lower law twice over by committing adultery in a lesbian marriage—a radical form of praise in any era, let alone in 1899—she excoriates Gwinn for breaking the higher law of love by throwing Eva under the bus. But Gwinn will get her comeuppance, merely by virtue of what and where she is. A professor of medieval English, trapped in the banalities of college Gothic—many would consider that a fate worse than death.
This poem about sexual betrayal furnishes some of the best early evidence that some of Natalie Barney’s most interesting work was neither old-fashioned nor derivative. It is refreshingly “modern” in digging into the realities of lesbian life. Barney is fluent in the canon of “old” books, and she is also “making it new.” In this sonnet to M. G., she is grappling with the passions and dilemmas of living out and proud at the dawn of the new century.
This poem also shows that the study of Natalie Barney’s writing must, from now on, account for gaps in her knowledge. From her focus on “M. G.,” it is clear that Natalie did not know about Lucy Donnelly. Eva had stuck to her principles in never naming names. Did Natalie really imagine that Mamie Gwinn, who lived on campus in the President’s lodgings (called the Deanery), had been sleeping with Eva? Apparently so. The French line “C’est toi l’amoureuse” is difficult to render into English. Its syntax is often read as an accusation (as in J’accuse). We read this as meaning not just “You are the lover” but “The lover is you.”[14]
This poem appears as one of many in A Few Sonnet-Portraits of Women (Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes), Barney’s first book. Natalie knew that Liane’s novel would be a runaway success.[15] She was so deeply invested that she was reading Liane’s manuscript and making comments in the margins.[16] From this, we infer that Natalie envisioned timing the publication of her book to coincide with the publication of Liane’s, or at least to ride on its coattails. But Natalie and Liane had broken up by the end of 1899, and Liane postponed publication.
Even before The Three Sapphos, Natalie was searching for a bandmate. Liane, however, was a soloist who never wanted to share the stage. Her decision to walk away shook Natalie’s confidence and clouded her judgment in the months that followed. But despite their breakup, Natalie’s faith in Liane had been well-placed. Liane was a talented writer, and Sapphic Idyll stands as the first and best lesbian novel of its era. Plans for its publication built momentum. Natalie was not the only one aiming to capitalize on it. Olga Nethersole seized the moment by starring in a sapphic play.
For now, separated from Liane, Natalie’s fame would have to rest on her own poetry alone. In March 1900, Natalie sent her manuscript to the editor Paul Ollendorff. She paid for the printing of 500 copies.[17] The slim sapphic volume would come out that summer.[18] (Yes, it was that kind of coming out!)
Meanwhile, Natalie, on the rebound, had begun a new love affair with Pauline Tarn.
Notes
[1] Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer, 13 Dec. 1900, no. NCB2-EP_13, Eva Palmer Sikelianos Papers, Center for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, Greece: “I think there is no better thing than this!...to be your lover and your friend, your believer and your giver of faith...and whatever else or more life or death may make me.”
[2] Daudet was never elected to the French Academy, whose members (called the Immortals), serve for life. Daudet skewered the institution in his 1888 novel L’Immortel.
[3] Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1924), https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.77234/page/n7/mode/2up. Salonistes Bessy Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe had been leasing a house on the Versailles property of Minna, Lady Anglesey (called “Minnie”), ever since a mutual friend, ambassador Myron Herrick, helped secure Marbury’s book of business in France.
[4] Minnie Anglesey was a close family friend of the Barneys and backed Natalie unconditionally through thick and thin. For example, it was at Lady Anglesey’s that Natalie was introduced to Romaine Brooks, her life-partner, in 1916. It was a small world. Gossip really did get around. Alfred Allan Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women (New York: Penguin, 2001), 190–91.
[5] “A New Grand Opera,” Los Angeles Times 11 July 1897, 14.
[6] “Another ‘Sappho’ Production,” New York Times, 26 Aug. 1899, 5.
[7] “ ‘Teaches a Moral’,” Baltimore Sun, 12 Mar. 1900, 12.
[8] In 1905, Liane de Pougy wrote to Natalie boasting that she intended to dedicate a new edition of Sapphic Idyll to Eva. Natalie replied forcefully that Liane needed to remove every identifiable reference to Eva. And ended with a threat: “Tu ne veux pas m’écouter? tant pis — mais surtout pour toi. Natalie.” Natalie copied her letter out and included it in a letter to Eva. Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer (“Evalina”), postmarked 14 Dec. 1905, NCB C2 2995 (191-192), fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.
[9] Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), Sonnet III, in Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1900; repr. Verona: L’Amazone retrouvée, 1999), 6, 59.
[10] Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), “[Untitled] You lack the rigor of antiquity,” in Selected Poems, trans. Samantha Pious (Sequim, WA: Headmistress, 2025), 31.
[11] John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, Volume II: The Sea-Stories (London: Routledge, n.d.), 165–251, esp. 169.
[12] In ancient Athenian philosophy and law, hubris was the use of violence to humiliate a victim. Because some poets, notably Hesiod and Aeschylus, also used it to refer to sins against the gods, modern classicists came to believe that hubris was the personal arrogance that led to those sins, not the sins themselves. David D. Phillips, The Law of Ancient Athens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 86.
[13] Eva Palmer took Elementery Greek at Bryn Mawr in the fall of 1897; Gwinn had written her dissertation on Beowulf.
[14] Translating with a focus on meter (as Samantha Pious has done above) does not unlock the secret of this poem. What matters is the syntax... and that syntax does not lend itself easily to iambic pentameter.
In this context, the informal tu (rather than the formal vous) does not necessarily mean that M. G. is the speaker’s lover. Instead, it is an insult—M. G. is unworthy of respect.
[15] Indeed it was. It is believed that Idylle saphique went through sixty reprints in its first year.
[16] The notebook containing the handwritten manuscript of Liane de Pougy’s Idylle saphique is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), as Mss. NAF 29027. The image published here is on page 199. We thank Suzette Robichon for generously examining the manuscript, verifying the handwriting, checking our transcription, and providing the images published here.
[17] Camille Islert, “ ‘Je ne pouvais pourtant pas refuser À mes vers la protection de ma prose’: Théorie et dérision dans la préface de Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes de Natalie Barney,” Fabula / Les colloques, Penser la poésie: Théorie littéraire féminine à la Belle Epoque, ed. Wendy Prin-Conti and Camille Islert (2023), par. 2–3, http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document11037.php.
[18] Eva Palmer (“Evelina Palmer”) to Natalie Barney (“Natalie”), 28 July 1900, JD C2 2920 1-2 (1), fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. Eva compliments Natalie on her book, implying that Natalie has given her a copy.