Emma Hogan

Sylvia Beach said that Americans came to the Left Bank for two things they couldn’t get at home, alcohol and Ulysses, but they also came for the cafés, the galleries, the nightlife. Butch women could be found dancing and drinking at Le Monocle at a time when dressing in men’s clothing was technically a crime – in photographs taken by Brassaï they stare defiantly into the camera, hair slicked back, shoulders broadened by boxy suit jackets.

Jansson had many euphemisms for lesbianism: ‘rive gauche’, as if all Parisian women were at it; ‘borderliner’; a ‘new line’, ‘tendency’, ‘attitude’. She had become more discreet since her affair with Vivica Bandler. Some of this reticence was due to her parents’ reaction. Her father tried to ask her if the rumours were true, but couldn’t say the word ‘homosexual’ because it made him so angry.