MY BLUE NOTEBOOKS - AN INTIMATE JOURNAL by LIANE DE POUGY aka PRINCESS GHIKA OF ROUMANIA

 Liane De Pougy authored a few novelesque books in her time, including one in which the thinly disguised Natalie Clifford Barney was portrayed.

This book covers a period from 1900 to World War II when the famous Paris courtesan, born in 1869 and married to her Prince, who was fifteen years younger than she, was getting older.  She reports needing eyeglasses and a cane and having a number of ailments including colitis.  Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Roumania, as was her title then, died in 1950 and at that time was associated with a nunnery devoted to taking care of severely disabled children.

The book was published after Liane De Pougy's death and is a diary.  

Here are excerpts from pages 14-15-16 of the Introduction by R.P. Rzewuski.  (He was a priest she admired and befriended.) 

"To everyone's amazement the career of 'the most beautiful courtesan of the century' came to an abrupt end while still at its most brilliant.  Her marriage to Prince Georges Ghika (who was younger than herself) was announced.

Once she was a Princess, Liane had the good taste never to parade the fact.  Besides which, her relationships with her husband's family would hardly have allowed it, because they never fully accepted her.  By the same token she was never able to create an authentic place for herself in society."

Liane sincerely wanted to consign the years of her worldly success to oblivion, and even to forget them herself.  Forget the princes, the grand-dukes, the politicians the financiers who had heaped their crowns, fortunes, celebrity, and talent as her feet  That world, however, continued on in its way and was neither able or willing to forget her and - cruel as it can be sometimes be - it did not do so.

___

What more can I say about her? Some two tor three years after we met in Lausanne, on the death of her husband***, she confided in me her desire to be received under the name of Sister Anne-Marie into the Order of Saint Dominic, as a tertiary lay sister. ***

***Prince Georges Ghika of Roumania died in 1945

*** The Dominicans are nuns who are cloistered and live contemplative lives.  A lay sister is not a person who lives cloistered but in the regular world, but is still devoted to their religious beliefs.