At the outset of Pauline’s Parisian life, drunk with her new freedom and the means to enjoy it, she found her old friend Violet too serious for her mood, and some sort of “puerile” misunderstanding occurred. Through Violet, however, she had met a ‘fellow-exile and nascent poet’ who was undoubtedly Natalie Clifford Barney. Her new friend introduced her to Sappho, as yet unknown to her. Until now, says Germain, she had been a _jeune fille_, ‘doubly unawakened either as poet or as woman.’ The new contact proved a double revelation, as well it might. Here was a beautiful sophisticate whose poetic gifts and interests, worldly resources, and emotional tastes matched her own; here, too, at last, was the great classical poet who glorified those tastes. In order to know Sappho better she set herself to learn Greek, and in her ‘passionate fervor’ mastered it “avec une facilité qui stupéfiait ses professeurs.” She and Barney lived together, and it must have been during these years between 1898 and 1900 that she acquired the villa above Mitylene where intermittently “for months at a time she attempted to recapture the golden age of Sappho.”[18] We know from Gourmont’s account that both young women were writing poetry, and as soon as she considered publication (possibly even earlier) Pauline adopted the new name under which thereafter she lived as well as wrote—Renée Vivien, suggesting a radiant rebirth. Two poems published in the same volume with those already quoted convey her exaltation at this time better than any account of them can do. One was “Ainsi Je Parlerai:” Si le Seigneur penchait son front sur mon trépas Je lui dirais: O Christ, je ne te connais pas. Seigneur, ta stricte loi ne fut jamais la mienne, Et je vécus ainsi qu’un simple païenne ... Le monde était autour de moi, tel un jardin. Je buvais l’aube claire et le soir cristallin. Le soleil me ceignait de ses plus vives flammes, Et l’amour m’incline vers la beauté des femmes ... Pardonne-moi, qui fus une simple païenne! Laisse-moi retourner vers la splendeur ancienne Et, puisque enfin l’instant éternel est venu, Rejoindre celles-là qui t’ont point connu.[19] Far from being the mere defiant sacrilege this seemed to some readers, it was the confession of a new faith to replace the one in whose name England had damned her. In its entirety, much too long to quote, the poem is also an apologia for her first love so slandered by her “persecutors.” She elaborated her creed in “Psappha Revit,” among whose fourteen quatrains appear such lines as these: