If there had been a lesbian map of the world in the first half of the twentieth century, the twin poles would have been located, not at icy regions to north and south, but at a Greek island and a French city. Lesbos itself, where Sappho had first given utterance to the sexual desire of one woman for another, was a place of pilgrimage, despite its primitive tourist infrastructure and the bemused or frankly hostile attitude of its inhabitants towards those who came to commune with the spirit of the classical poetess. Lesbianism’s true nirvana, however, lay beside the Seine rather than the Aegean. Paris, orientated towards the female in everything from haute couture to the grandes horizontales became, sometime around 1890, the paradise of sapphists, especially those with time and money at their disposal.

Clifford Barney (the daughter of a whisky heiress and a railway magnate), whose awareness of her own sexuality had kicked in when, as a small girl, she played with a toy swan in the bath. Adolescent crushes were soon followed by more serious liaisons, and only the practical consideration of needing to placate her father so as to inherit his vast income prompted her to accept a marriage proposal from the nephew of the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Where Natalie’s fiancé drew the line was at her relationship with the courtesan Liane de Pougy, whom she had ogled from a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne. Robert Cassatt’s Edith Whartonian milieu might have winked at same-sex passion, but a hooker – however fond she was of poetry, Poiret frocks and asparagus risotto – was still a hooker.

Natalie may have been greedily promiscuous, but she retained an interesting streak of American evangelical high-mindedness. Throughout her sessions with Liane – between be silk sheets, on a polar-bear rug, or in the scented bath tub – she hoped that this poule de luxe, who served peaock foie gras for lunch and started her day with an enema, would eventually renounce her profession altogether. Liane flattered Natalie, calling her a gift from heaven and buying her Lalique necklaces, but was shrewd enough to go on drumming up clients, aware that her lover’s peevish, drunken father could call time on the relationship whenever he chose. Robert Cassatt had acknowledged defeat, but Albert Barney swept his daughter back to the United States, incarcerating her in a 26-room cottage on the coast of Maine, built to resemble a Welsh castle. Liane, having sketched out a novel about her liaison with Natalie, married a Romanian prince before becoming a nun.

Mercifully, Albert dropped dead on the golf course and Natalie, now a millionairess, could fall in love again, this time with Pauline Tarn, heir to an English grocery fortune, who had reinvented her elf as the French poetess Renee Vivien. Gloomy, insecure and sexually gauche, Renee soon had a rival in Olive Custance, who was engaged to Oscar Wilde’s lover Bosie Douglas but not averse to a fling with the glamorous, well-heeled Miss Barney. When Olive finally agreed to become Lady Alfred, Renee was restored to favour, but the romance of a trip to Lesbos was clouded by her increasing anorexia and the machinations of a predatory baroness known as La Brioche, who snapped her up on her return to France. Natalie Barney’s Paris garden

Settling in Paris for good, Natalie opened a salon at her house in Rue Jacob, essentially a lesbian arts club in which men were welcome but never allowed to dominate. Cocteau, Tagore, Rilke, D’Annunzio and Gide all dropped in ‘for the cutting edge of art, and strawberry tarts’ as Diana Souhami puts it, while the hectic parade of female lovers came and went. Most of them (including Lily de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, who gave Proust valuable hints on dinner table placement for À la recherche du temps perdu and pioneered the crop-haired look in lesbian Paris) quickly made the sideways move from grand passion to steadfast friend – until, at a tea party in 1917, Natalie met the painter Romaine Brooks and lost her heart for ever.

The archetypal misery of Romaine’s girlhood had been made worse by surplus wealth. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother a deranged egoist, offering whatever love was not spent on herself to Romaine’s mad brother St Mar, who became terrified of hills, went to bed in his overcoat, dropped bottles from high windows on the heads of defenceless pedestrians, and believed he was being permanently molested by God and the saints. After being farmed out to a beer-swigging Irish washerwoman, Romaine was temporarily rescued by her father’s secretary, but a reunion with the family was enough to provoke an attempt at poisoning herself by eating the sulphur off match heads.

Her life never lost its lurid dimension of the dramatic. Seduced by her mother’s doctor while studying art in Paris, she dumped the resulting bastard in a convent and ran away to Capri, where on impulse she married the stupendously ineffectual John Ellingham Brooks. Bored by his pederasty and smelly tobacco, Rornaine returned to Paris to begin a series of high-profile lesbian affairs, including a fling with Renke Vivien, whom she thought affected and childish, before Natalie arrived to challenge her intrinsic selfishness. The ensuing relationship was more intense by virtue of their emotional mismatch. Where ‘Nat Nat’ was generous and considerate (despite continuing casual infidelities), her ‘Angel’ remained inexorably-haughty, demanding, and possessive.

The final section of Wild Girls brilliantly counterbalances Natalie’s deepening adoration of Romaine with her lover’s pathological, almost devilish manipulativeness. There is tragedy here, enhanced by Romaine’s sinister tendency in old age to imitate the monstrous mother who had blighted her youth. If our hearts don’t bleed quite as much as they should, this is because, for all her early sufferings, she, like Natalie, never needed to struggle very hard to get what she wanted. There were always servants, for most of the time there was plenty of money, and above all, in an age which vilified and prosecuted sexual deviants, each woman enjoyed complete freedom of self-realisation and self-expression. Diana Souhami’s cunning insertion of occasional vignettes from her own, rather less opulent existence as a modern gay woman enhances our awareness that this U, book is as much a tribute to lesbian fulfilment as a straightforward chronicle of its subjects’ lives. Her skill, not just in garnering detail, but in finding the perfect lace for it. is unrivalled. and we share her robust enjoyment in awarding celebrity walk-on roles to everyone from Ida Rubinstein and Radclyffe Hall to Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and Oscar Wilde’s sad, dope-fuddled niece Dolly. Ultimately, however, this kind of boulevard schmoozing matters less, Souhami’s book rightly suggests, than the emotional engagement between two women which took place amidst it. Natalie’s salon and Romaine’s painting may be no more than cultural footnotes, but their love, in all its tortured, resistless grandeur, deserves a kind of immortality.