Book excerpt: Liane de Pougy, known as Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesan, was a Folies-Bergère dancer who became a princess and died a nun. Between 1919 and 1941 she wrote her intimate memoir, My Blue Notebooks. Making modern tell-alls seem downright tepid by comparison, this long-out-of-print classic is a fascinating look into the mind of an audacious woman of great intelligence and humor. In My Blue Notebooks, de Pougy describes hosting the likes of Jean Cocteau and the poet Max Jacob, her best friend ("Never again. Never more than one writer at a time"). She shares her literary critiques of her "friend" Colette ("I look down on her with a grimace of disgust"), recalls the funeral of Nicholas I (she happened to be in St. Petersburg at the time), and reports the sad early death of her acquaintance Marcel Proust. She writes graphically of her many sexual liaisons with both men and women, including her complex marriage to the "too handsome" Prince Georges Ghika of Romania and her difficult relationship with Nathalie Clifford Barney, perhaps the real love of her life. Here is a voyeuristic feast of high society living during the first decades of the twentieth century.