The truly Decadent saga of the Greek poet begins with the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, which Charles Baudelaire had initially intended to call “The Lesbians.” He depicted Sappho as an advocate of sapphism and an inaccessible goddess. Algernon Charles Swinburne, an admirer of Baudelaire, published a collection of poems in 1866 in which he included a personal “translation” of some of her poetry. Giving free rein to his imagination, he embraced the unbridled passion of the poetess for her female lovers. In his reinterpretation, he saw her poetry and her homosexuality as indivisible. Toward the end of the century, Pierre Louÿs caused a sensation when he published Les Chansons de Bilitis. His heroine was an imitator, almost a double, of the Tenth Muse.

Baudelaire superimposed himself on Sappho, erasing her from his text; Swinburne adapted her poetry without translating it; Louÿs brought her back to life in fiction; but Renée Vivien reread Sappho’s poetry from a new, overtly homosexual perspective, exploring the very concept of artistic creativity. She was the first to produce a comprehensive and entirely new translation of the classical writer’s poetry. She found in these poetic fragments, devoted entirely to female friends, a complementary echo to her own feelings, and she dedicated herself to poems of sapphic inspiration that launched a discreet cult.