It’s All Hallows Eve around the world, and in Paris the graveyards must be buzzing with activity among members of the Scorpions Club, founded by Franco-American author and saloniste Natalie Clifford Barney, born this day in 1876, to honor a group of intimates who all shared her birthday.

Every year she threw a party in Paris at her famous address, 20 rue Jacob, to celebrate. Everybody was always there.

You can read about the spicy goings-on in Francesco’s Rapazzini’s delightful novel about the 1926 party, Un soir chez l’Amazone. I’ve made a translation with Sally Hamilton. This year, we added drawings by Eliza Jackson, befitting the tragicomedy. We’re seeking publication….

Here in Virginia under the Scorpions moon, my daughter is out walking the streets wearing black lipstick, channeling Wednesday Addams. I’m not sure Miss Barney would approve. Or would she?

I’m at home, dashing to post this before midnight on Mademoiselle’s 142^nd birthday. My dispatch is a little thin, and for that I apologize.

This year, 2018, marks the 100^thanniversary of the marriage contract signed in France by Barney and Élisabeth de Gramont. What an extraordinary document. You can read it here on James Conway’s Strange Flowers, such a good site.

When Natalie turned 42 in 1918, she was just settling into a three-way marriage with Gramont (1875-1954) and American painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) that would last their whole lives long. Strange how what’s so old still seems so new, so cutting-edge.

A remarkable one-woman show starring Amanda Boxer as Natalie Barney played at the Arcola Theater in London earlier this year. The creators talk about the project here on YouTube. The performances I saw were well-attended, and I hope this bodes well for more stories about NCB. The play, The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney by Frances Bingham, is a great read. Buy it here from the publisher, Pottery Press. They do extraordinarily beautiful, handmade books.

The Smithsonian’s beautiful 2016 exhibition of works by Romaine Brooks has begun to travel. In Florida, “The Art of Romaine Brooks” runs through December 9 at the Polk Museum of Art. Dr. Cassandra Langer, Brooks’s 21^stcentury biographer, gave a talk there in October. “I was impressed by the intelligent questions coming from a mixed-age audience of people from different backgrounds,” she said. “People were interested in the everyday lives of all three women and their wide circles of artists, writers and musicians.” Here’s an LAL Daily article reporting on the unpacking. If you have photos of the installation, please email them and I’ll include them here.

Cassandra Langer and I are having fun working on a book of humor about the woman Robert de Montesquiou called “The Thief of Souls.”

Speaking of Montesquiou is speaking of Proust, and I see that Dr. Langer is to be giving a Proust Society talk in at the New York Public Library on March 14, 2019. Save the date. The subject is Proust’s lesbians, such an interesting topic, especially when approached from the lens of the Barney household! Lily de Gramont was Montesquiou’s cousin and one of Marcel Proust’s best friends (along with Lily’s childhood friend, Lucy Delarue-Mardrus, another one of NCB’s lovers). And yet when Natalie Barney met Marcel Proust on the pretext of his wanting to quiz her on lesbians, she came away convinced he didn’t know the first thing about the subject. (By the way, the YouTube video is misdated. The  interview took place during the summer of 1967, not 1966.)

2019 will also be the year that their bohemian friend Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952) gets her first English biography. The author is University of Michigan Professor Artemis Leontis. Eva Palmer’s life story is fascinating, from New York Society to classical studies at turn-of-the-(20th)-century Bryn Mawr, to archaeology and theater, music and dance, to wartime and postwar (WW2) politics. Her lost letters, removed in 1969 from Natalie Barney’s house and discovered in Athens by Professor Leontis, are a treasure trove. Get ready to discover a great American woman, almost lost to history, who made major accomplishments in many fields. For example, did you know that without Palmer, who dedicated her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture, we wouldn’t have the excavation at Delphi, one of the most extraordinary sites of Greek antiquity? Follow the news here about Professor Leontis’s book, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

A book by Lia Papadaki about Eva Palmer and her husband, Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, was also published in Greek this year by the Benaki Museum. My efforts to learn Greek over the past couple years haven’t gotten me very far, so I’m sorry to say that I haven’t read it. But I look forward to picking up a copy the next time I’m in Athens. I’m sure it’s a beautiful book; the Benaki is incapable of second class design.

From University of Minnesota Press this year, we also had the double biography of Barney and Brooks’s friends Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar by Joan E. Howard. The title says it all: We Met in Paris. I’m told the Albertine bookshop was packed to the gills at Joan Howard’s reading in September. I was lucky to be at the book launch, back in July, on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, where Frick and Yourcenar lived and wrote Memoirs of Hadrian. The house has daily visitors from all over the world during the summer, with Joan Howard giving bilingual tours, and it is lovingly tended year-round by Jayne Persson, director of the Petite Plaisance Conservation Fund. I highly recommend a visit the next time you’re down east. You also might consider a donation. Cultural sites like this are so rare in the United States. Even rarer are houses of creative lesbian expatriates like Gertrude Stein & Alice Toklas, Natalie Barney & Co., and Marguerite Yourcenar & Grace Frick.

I enjoyed talking earlier this year with Texas A & M Professor Melanie Hawthorne about Natalie Barney’s old flame, another daughter of Michigan, Pauline Tarn, a Symbolist poet who wrote under the pen name Renée Vivien. Professor Hawthorne has interesting things to say. I’m so remiss! I’ll dispatch that interview to you soon.

And no, I haven’t seen two films about friends of Miss B, Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince or Wash Westmoreland’s Colette.

Please write to me with news of new projects about Miss Barney and her circle. I hope NCB’s 143^rdanniversary will bring news that my translation of Francesco Rapazzini’s biography of Elisabeth de Gramont will finally be published.

For now, let’s congratulate Francesco Rapazzini on the success of his third novel, Un été vénétien, just out from Editions Bartillat, which sounds dreamy and Proustian and Venitian all at once. I’m so looking forward to reading it in French. Here’s a video review (in French) on Babelio. You can buy it here on Amazon for Kindle.

Oh my god look at the time. It’s the bewitching hour. I need to post this letter. Or else!

Many happy returns of your 142nd, Mademoiselle. You’re still every inch the young lady of the future.