The Translator
Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the books pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph. As a translator, he has developed versions of French plays, both classic and contemporary, for the NT and the Gate Theatre, with performances both here and in the USA. Publications include The Figaro Plays (Beaumarchais) and A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau). For Dedalus he has translated Sappho by Alphonse Daudet, Chasing the Dream and A Woman’s Affair by Liane de Pougy.
His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.
Dedication to L’insaisissable
To the Author whom I like best, to the Writer who, without knowing it, was my master, to Jean Lorrain I dedicate these first attempts of a poor little doll’s brain which he opened up to vast horizons and to the unknown.
I offer him my book in gratitude… and in memory… and in friendship… and also in mild defiance… knowing in advance that those who read it and enjoy it will say that it is not by me… and those who find it bad will spare me none of their malevolence…
And to each of them, for his trouble… I say: Thank you!
Liane de Pougy
Contents
The Translator
Dedication to L’insaisissable
Introduction
I
II
Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois
III
To the Same
IV
To the Same
V
To the Same
VI
To the Same
VII
To the Same
VIII
Jean Leblois to Josiane de Valneige
IX
Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois
X
To the Same
XI
Jean Leblois to Josiane de Valneige
XII
Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois
XIII
To the Same
XIV
To the Same
XV
To the Same
XVI
To the Same
XVII
Jean Leblois to Josiane de Valneige
XVIII
Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois
XIX
To the Same
XX
To the Same
XXI
To the Same
XXII
To the Same
XXIII
To the Same
XXIV
Jean Leblois to Josiane de Valneige
XXV
Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois
XXVI
To the Same
XXVII
To the Same
XXVIII
To the Same
Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature 2018–2028
Copyright
Introduction
L’insaisissable (Chasing The Dream) is the first of a number of ‘courtesan novels’ written by a young woman, born Anne-Marie Chassaigne, who received her education in a convent school and left it, pregnant, at sixteen; and who, a year or two later, abandoned husband and child, ran away to Paris and changed her name to Liane de Pougy.
Liane was her own invention, de Pougy a borrowing from an aristocratic lover. It had not taken Liane long to progress from chorus dancer and part-time prostitute to grande horizontale. For if she was going to make a living by selling herself, she was determined to sell to the richest patrons and live in style. Born in 1869, she had become by the turn of the century one of the most fêted courtesans of the day. She was not the first to exploit her situation, or enhance her profile, by portraying a version of the lifestyle in fiction. Her friend and mentor, Valtesse de la Bigne, had published Isola in 1876 and it may be that Liane thought to emulate her in literary matters as well. Or possibly she found Zola’s Nana (1880) to be insufficiently first-hand. What becomes clear, however, is that Liane de Pougy the writer was by no means an artificial or temporary construct. She published eight books in the ten years from 1898 to 1908. The first of them, L’insaisissable, was written in 1895/96 and could be considered as a kind of half-time report on her career to date.
It describes the journey of its central character, Josiane de Valneige, from unhappy provincial housewife to glamorous courtesan, a journey she hopes will also lead to true love. The novel falls into two parts. The first is an animated account of her many adventures, some gleeful, some despairing, with a variety of lovers, from bankers and politicians to journalists and actors. Finding that none of these liaisons has led to the true happiness she seeks, Josiane retires to the country, where she falls for an innocent and ardent young man. Their idyllic (and chaste) relationship nevertheless comes to a sad end; and it seems that true love is indeed insaisissable, ungraspable.
Although it is her first work, and not a lengthy one, and is written by an author in only her mid-twenties, Chasing the Dream already has distinctive qualities. It has the structure of an epistolary novel: Josiane de Valneige’s adventures are told to an old flame in a series of letters, to which he occasionally replies. The episodic nature of this first section becomes an asset rather than a drawback: the reader, like the old flame, is left at the end of each letter thinking ‘Whatever next?’ And in the second section, the confessional nature of the letters allows Josiane to be both actor and commentator as the relationship unfolds.
Alongside her sure-footed management of the story, de Pougy gives her heroine a particularly winning voice. Josiane de Valneige is energetic, ambitious and enjoyably vain. She has an acute sense of her own worth as a demi-mondaine whilst acknowledging how superficial those values are. She is funny, reckless and vulnerable. When knocked down, she suffers, but never for long. She will try again; the quest is always worth the gamble. If the particular voice here is Josiane’s, the spirit behind it is very much that of the author.
Liane de Pougy’s subsequent works include Le mauvais part: Myrrhille, which takes a darker look at the life of a courtesan; Idylle saphique, her most significant novel, which fictionalises her real-life affair with a young American woman, Natalie Clifford Barney; and Les sensations de Mlle de la Bringue, in which the heroine, damaged by her life as a courtesan, is nevertheless able to retire to Brittany (where de Pougy kept a cottage) to reflect in safety on her experiences.
At the age of forty, to the surprise of all, Liane de Pougy married. Her husband was Georges Ghika, a minor Romanian prince, fifteen years her junior. The former (and long-divorced) Anne-Marie Pourpe, née Chassaigne, famous for being Liane de Pougy, became Princess Ghika. A further transformation was in store towards the end of her long life. The marriage lasted, not without upheavals, until Prince Ghika’s death in 1944.
It was the death of her son in 1914 that prompted Liane de Pougy, perhaps in atonement for her past life, perhaps in search of consolation, to turn to religion. Marc Pourpe, born in 1887, had been brought up by his paternal grandparents in Suez, where he had learned to fly. He was killed in an air accident in the first months of the Great War. Years later, in 1928, a second significant event brought focus to the vague quest for a greater spiritual purpose. The Ghikas made a chance visit to a convent in Savoy: it turned out to be an asylum for disabled children. The plight of the inmates and the devoted care given by the nuns made such a deep impression on the former Liane de Pougy that she became their no less devoted sponsor for the rest of her life, donating money for improvements to the buildings and raising funds from her many wealthy contacts.
As war loomed towards the end of the 1930s, the Ghikas moved to Lausanne in Switzer
land, and there, after her husband’s death, Liane de Pougy, befriended and counselled by Father Rzewuski, a Dominican priest, became a tertiary of the order of Saint Dominic.
Liane de Pougy died in 1950, aged 81, as Sister Anne-Marie de la Pénitence, and was buried in the grounds of the asylum of Sainte-Agnès which she had so long supported and which had become her spiritual home.
Liane de Pougy kept a diary between the wars, from 1919 to 1941, which was published posthumously in 1977 as Mes cahiers bleus. Diana Athill published an English translation, My Blue Notebooks, in 1979.
Idylle saphique (A Woman’s Affair), Liane de Pougy’s major work, is now available from Dedalus Books, who also publish Jean Lorrain’s best known novel, Monsieur de Phocas.
I
The clock chimed two in the afternoon.
In the dressing room, warm and closeted, with its floating silks and the winter sun gleaming on its white lacquered furniture, Josiane de Valneige, lying full length on a chaise longue in the idle disorder of her negligee, ran her lips slowly round the rim of a small Meissen cup.
The angelic Gérard entered the room.
‘The angelic Gérard’ they all called her, this short, round woman, who had earned a fame of her own in the wider fame of her very beautiful mistress. And the name, in a phrase, said everything about her role in the house, explained the whole household itself. For did it not reveal that the woman who bore it with such dedication was, according to need, both servant and trusted friend, counsellor and accomplice, a guardian angel at times?
And when Mme de Valneige exclaimed: ‘Oh, Gérard my angel, I am so out of sorts today!’, this woman could respond in a manner all her own, affectionate yet with the sort of pleasing dignity that commanded respect, which made the angelic Gérard resemble some beloved family nurse of the kind Shakespeare gives his Juliet.
Mme de Valneige had gradually raised herself on one elbow. With her free hand she was languidly arranging her startling blonde hair, and in her blue eyes there seemed to shiver the traces of a dream.
‘Gérard my angel… oh, no papers, no letters… don’t bring me anything today… I don’t want to hear anyone’s news, I don’t want to read a word… or even speak one… pass me my mirror.’
‘Madame will change her mind. It’s a surprise. Guess.’
‘No, not this early in the day.’
‘M. Leblois.’
‘Jean!’
‘He is here. He’s waiting.’
‘Oh! Send him in!’
Then, a moment later: ‘Gérard my angel, take that picture of M. de Normande down from the mantelpiece… I don’t know why it’s there… it’s not a good idea to mix the present with all those old memories Jean brings to mind.’
‘Do you still love him, then?’
‘Love him? Good Lord, no. That would be far too straightforward and sweet. Just a thought that comes to a woman’s mind… quick then, Gérard, off you go.’
And Josiane sat up, knees raised under the light material, hands clasped round them. Her deep blue eyes unblinking, her face grave, she was a study in contemplation. And nothing is prettier or more rare than the spectacle of a woman lost in thought.
Amazing! Jean Leblois was outside! Could he really be about to appear, Jean, whom she had not seen for five years? It was true she had lost track of plenty of others over her career; she even congratulated herself on the fact and would declare herself extremely content never to see them again. But this man, for her, had special significance.
He had been the first: her first lover in a marriage that had become all too dull, the man who, at a time when she was the wife of a small-holder from the Touraine, on the slopes of Chinon, had taken her in adultery and kindled its full flowering.
Not that she expended much emotion – it already seemed so distant – on the memory of a provincial romance that was really a romance of the imagination. But all the same, this was the man with whom she had escaped, leaving behind everything. He was the one who enabled – precipitated – the break-up of a bourgeois existence too burdensome for an impatient twenty-year-old to bear, her flight into love and recklessness, her freedom, and then… all that followed. And if it was only to provide herself with an excuse, she was determined not to let this one be forgotten.
With a confident stride, his unclouded face wearing the smile of a friend, Jean Leblois came towards her.
She looked at him with curiosity and noticed that he was going grey.
A woman does not like to see a man she has had acquiring his grey hairs in a life beyond hers. It is as if he has done her some wrong in allowing himself to be used and tired out by another woman.
And straight away she said to him, having made him sit beside her and having retained in her own for a moment the hand he offered: ‘My dear Jean, it is such a pleasure to meet again… tell me all your woes.’
‘Woes? But I don’t have any woes. I am now the most peaceful and naturally happy of fellows… oh, my poor Josiane, how I loved you…! It wasn’t Josiane de Valneige in those days, it was Louise, little Mme Aubertin, a woman you’d have given the earth for… just as you gave me heaven back… I still have a letter where you said I was the man you used to dream about in convent school… and then, when we ran away to Paris, you in your brown dress, your little nose quivering in this new air, your eyes and your mouth drinking it in, the hôtel Malmai-son in rue Lafitte, and our passionate love… or mine anyway.’
‘Oh, don’t think like that, Jean… I did love you…’
‘In your way.’
Josiane was silent for a moment. Then, slowly, she said: ‘Is it my fault if I didn’t love you more…? All I wanted was to love you, yes, truly, I promise you… and all I want still is to be able to love you… but you now, tell me some more about yourself.’
‘Me, my dear friend…? After all those long voyages my parents sent me on to break up our relationship, that was it with passion for me… I’m a married man, a father with a family to keep! For you I am now your devoted friend, who has come to visit you in the nicest sort of way. I can come without any danger.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’ Josaine said, a flash of coquetry springing to the defence of her womanly graces. But then, almost at once: ‘Yes, my dear Jean, you are right. You took it into your head to pay me this visit and I am very thankful; thankful above all for your belief that I would still be pleased to have your friendship. I want to remain, in your eyes, the woman you knew and who had much that is good in her, whatever other people may believe.’
For in this unexpected situation, in this intimacy, Josiane found herself experiencing something both charming and delightful.
To know a man as a friend, a mere and simple friend, such a rarity!
It made her feel a different person, lending a new perspective that seemed both a pleasure and a benefit.
And to be discussing friendship, here, like this, in the dressing room of Josiane de Valneige, well, what a challenge to the public record!
When Jean Leblois had given a full account of his activities since those days up to his present life – which was in truth no more banal than anyone else’s (he kept a protective eye on his land, wife and sons, hunted, read books in a fine house a short distance from Tours) – he concluded his recital with the sudden enquiry: ‘But what about you, Josiane? Here you are, looking just as beautiful, in fact more beautiful than ever, but all the rest of it…? Tell me how you’ve been.’
‘My life is simple enough, and very complicated. You say your days of passion are over: not so for me. You are in port, I am on the open sea!’
‘But happy, at least?’
‘Do we ever know…! Yes, yes, I do know: deep down, I am not happy.’
A sigh escaped her, and at the same time a sudden sadness spread across that exquisite oval face.
‘Does that surprise you? How can a woman like me not be happy? And you think of this life I lead where the smallest whim is gratified. Alas…! Your eyes see this grand building in the rue de Pron
y, luxurious things all around me, luxuries I take for granted without wondering for a minute what they are for, where they come from, and you think: it can’t be so, impossible, ridiculous! Josiane de Valneige, recognised as the bestower of supreme joys, incapable of finding any happiness of her own! Ah, what was the point of coming this far, of being what I am, for the end result to be this!
‘Yes, a courtesan, my dear, a great courtesan, if there’s any pleasure to you and credit to me in my saying it; and deep down less joyful, less enviable than the meanest of girls who come here delivering my feathered hats.’
And in her tone could be heard something both grieving and strangely sincere.
‘In that case,’ Jean said, ‘speak out! Be open with me. What is wrong, my poor dear friend? If you are ever to be frank and trusting, you must be so with me.’
‘No, no… men do not understand these things, and though I may have given some of them cause to weep, I have no desire to give you cause to laugh.’
There was a silence, during which Jean watched her closely. Then more quietly, with a note of regret in her voice, an instrument she could make resonate at her bidding, she continued: ‘All the same, it would be good to tell it all to someone, a person who would understand, like you… to open my heart and ease the burden that stifles it.
‘My heart, yes, and so many people believe there is no such thing. In the first place, a woman like Josiane, how can she have one, why must she have one? What a fanciful claim that would be, completely at odds with her behaviour, her way of life. Out of the question!
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