French Folies Bergères dancer renowned as one of Paris’s most beautiful and notorious courtesans.
Raised in a nunnery, she ran off with Armand Pourpe at the age of 16, a naval officer, marrying because she was pregnant. The marriage was not a happy one. It is said that the groom was a brute and abused her – she wore the scar of his beatings on her breast for the rest of her life. When Armand Pourpe’s naval career led him to a billet in Marseilles, Anne-Marie took a lover, the Marquis Charles de MacMahon. When her husband found them in bed together he shot her with a revolver, wounding her on the wrist. Deciding to leave her husband, Anne Marie sold her rosewood piano to a young man who paid 400 francs cash for the instrument. Within an hour, Anne Marie was on her way to Paris, leaving her infant son with his father, who in turn sent his son to live with the boy’s grandparents, in Suez.
With the failure of her marriage, Anne Marie began dabbling in acting and prostitution and it is now known that she was a heavy user of both cocaine and opium.
She began her career as a courtesan with the Countess Valtesse de la Bigne, who taught Anne-Marie the profession and whose monumental bed was made of varnished bronze. Describing herself as vain but not a fool, Anne-Marie cultivated an interest in paintings, books and poetry, but avoided intellectual depth, which she considered dull.
After moving to Paris, from her position at the Folies she became a noted demimondaine, and a rival of ‘La Belle Otero’. She took her last name from one of her paramours, a Comte or Vicomte de Pougy. Actress Sarah Bernhardt, faced with the task of teaching Liane to act, advised her that when she was on stage, it would be best to keep her pretty mouth shut. Her lesbian affair with writer Natalie Clifford Barney is recorded in her novel Idylle Saphique, published around 1901.
Her son’s death as an aviator in World War I turned her towards religion and she became a tertiary of the Order of Saint Dominic as Sister Anne-Mary. She became involved in the Asylum of Saint Agnes, devoted to the care of children with birth defects.
Link to Wikipedia biography