Alphonse Lemerre owned a bookshop here and published Vivien's works here

Alphonse Lemerre was Vivien's publisher in Paris from the turn of the 20th century until 1908. In addition to the library that he owned with Vivien's works, he also owned a bookshop where he published most of her works. Here at 25 Rue des Grands Augustins, Lemerre published Vivien's first poetry books, including Études et Préludes and Cendres et poussières. Vivien published her books under the names of Renée Vivien, René Vivien (the masculine form of Renée) Pauline Tarn (her birth name), Paul Riversdale (these works she wrote in collaboration with Hélène), and Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt (one of her lovers). Her books of poetry are described as revolutionary for the time, as they are explicitly lesbian, many of them heavily influenced by the poetry that she translated by Sappho. One such poem, translated from French into English by Melanie Davis, is included here:

NIGHT

The light, in throes of agony, dies at your knee,
Come, o you whose guarded face, so lovely to see,
Carries dejection from years heavy and jaded:
Come, with your deadly welts turning pale, in distress,
With no other scent in the long folds of your dress
Than the breath of flowers which have long since faded.

Come, with your unrouged lips that ignite my desires,
Without rings, - neither rubies, opals, nor sapphires
Dishonoring your fingers, milky as the moon, -
And from your eyes put mirrored reflections to flight...
For it is here: the simple, chaste hour of the night
When hues can oppress, and luxury importune.

Yield up all your chagrin to eternal delight,
Exhale in a profound cry your suffering blight,
All those events of the past, so cruel and senseless,
Leave them to death, to the distance and to silence...
In the dream which to strife gives such sweet condolence;
To the ancient fever of speech: forgetfulness.

I will kiss your hands and your divine naked feet;
Our hearts will cry out for the neglect that they meet,
Will decry the vile words and base gestures anew...
These flights will linger in peaceful security....
You will join your hands in their mystic purity,
And, in the soul-filled shadows, I will adore you.

Most of Vivien's work was published posthumously and one of her biographers, Jean-Paul Goujon, believed that the reason for her large output of work was to prevent her memory from being completely destroyed and forgotten. Perhaps influenced by the fact that only fragments of Sappho's poetry have survived of the nine books that she wrote, Vivien was worried that her work would similarly be lost in time. Vivien received a lot of pushback while she was alive, as French poetry anthologies didn't include her work and her poetry was banned from some poetry readings in Paris.

Text Sources:

Davis, Melanie. “The Renée Vivien Translation Project.” Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.valkyria.ca/renee_vivien_page.html.

Engelking, Tama. “Renée Vivien’s Sapphic Legacy: Remembering the ‘House of Muses.’” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice 18, no. 1 & 2 (1993 1992): 126–127. https://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/5174/4372.

"Vivien, Renée 1877-1909. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/vivien-renee-1877-1909.

Image Source:

"Cover of Études et Préludes, Published in 1901." Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.valkyria.ca/renee_vivien_page.html.