His friendship with Barney began in 1910 and drifted along less and less satisfactorily for three years. By 1913 Gourmont betrays continual distress because she is so often absent, traveling with “une amie” and leaving no address, since most of the time, she and the friend are on the yacht he had helped her to procure. He owns to a resentment which surprises him, and implies that had he been able to divine her temperament at the outset he would not have permitted himself to become so involved. Yet we have here a close copy of the situation he himself had analyzed so clearly a dozen years before in _Un Songe de Femme_. There could be no stronger testimonial to the truth of Proust’s later contention that each individual follows repeatedly a compulsive emotional pattern, and does not profit by experience. Nor could there be a better picture of the difficulty the two sexes experience in mutual comprehension, even when both parties are psychologically so close to the intersexual borderline and have so many interests in common. Barney’s _Aventures de l’Esprit_ record primarily her association with the more or less notable literary figures of her day, and the judgments expressed are clear-headed and relatively merciless. _Actes et Entr’actes_, the only other volume available for examination, consists of four poetic dramas ranging from twenty-five to seventy pages each, and a dozen or so lyrics. One of the dramas, “Equivoque,” was presented in her garden in 1906 with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, in the leading role of Sappho. It represents Sappho’s death as resulting not from love of Phaon but from the loss of a beloved girl, Timas, who marries Phaon but subsequently, disgusted by her wedding night and overwhelmed by nostalgia for her great earlier love, follows Sappho to death in the sea. Two of the lyrics, “Virelai Nouveau” and “Filles,” represent the poet as following young _filles de joie_ on their twilight strolls and taking a man’s sensual pleasure in their consciously seductive beauty, but the enjoyment is detached, that of the _voyeur_ only. “Couple,” however, explicitly champions variance in its description of a loving pair: Se tenant par la taille—ainsi que deux bouleaux Reliés par leurs branches— Elles vont, ondulant leurs têtes et leurs hanches ... Elles tachent de fuir l’été, son corps doré Versant, comme une essence ... Sa mâle adolescence. (Compare Peladan’s Tammuz the sun god.)