The Red Duchess Turns 140

It’s always refreshing to meet a lesbian without complexes. April 23 is the birthday of the pleasure-loving French memoirist and music patron Elisabeth de Gramont, born in 1875. Today she turns 140.

I was in Paris last week gallivanting around with her biographer, Francesco Rapazzini. We did what Elisabeth would have done on the hunt for a perfect birthday gift: paid a visit to a Left Bank bookseller.

Rare books expert Chantal Bigot runs the tiny bookshop Librairie les Amazones in a courtyard off the rue Bonaparte. It’s open only by appointment. Here you can browse memoirs, letters and biographies by and about female iconoclasts like Lily de Gramont—provided you read French. Lily would have been over the moon there. One of her friends famously commented that when Madame looked you over, she was trying to see if you were edible. Chantal’s bookshop is a wonderland where every volume, whether a collectible or a contemporary small edition, is a world of sensuous pleasure in itself.

What to buy for April in Paris? I chose Lily’s correspondence with Liane de Pougy, beautifully published in 2006 in an edition of 200 by l’Amazone retrouvée with an introduction by Rapazzini. The 29 letters trace an unlikely love affair between the 47-year-old divorced duchess (a communist at heart) and the faded courtesan-turned-princess. Their passion began in August 1922, instigated by Natalie Barney, and lasted about a year until Natalie put a stop to it.

I paid by PayPal (which you can do by ordering online) then capped the perfect morning with a visit to the florist in the Marché St. Germain nearby.

 

 

 

For you, Madame. Happy birthday. Here’s to a few hundred more.

 

Librairie Les Amazones
Mme Chantal Bigot

68, rue Bonaparte
75006, Paris, France
Téléphone : 33 01 40 46 08 37
E-mail : lib.lesamazones@gmail.com