Evenings in Paris.

Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks * Diana Souhami * St. Martin's * $29.95

Diana Souhami's lesbian biographies just keep getting better. The author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, and Selkirk's Island now takes on another American couple of glamorous Left Bank artists--Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks--in Wild Girls, a read so light, fast, and fun that you forget it's nonfiction with footnotes. Check your Ph.D. at the door and just enjoy the ride: Wild Girls is the Moulin Rouge of belles lettres.

This time the award-winning British biographer trains her monocle on Barney's famous 1920s Paris salon, which showcased artistic innovators for 40 years. Never taking her focus off Barney and her tempestuous 55-year relationship with Brooks, Souhami leads us deep into the gaslit world of our gay great-great-grandmothers, late-Victorian rebels who became the first Moderns and posed for the portraits Brooks painted.

You could call them celebrity success stories and forgotten talents, addicts and suicides, nymphomaniacs and power wives--but you could never call them boring. Later, in the mid 1950s, when this generation of wild girls was beginning to die off, Truman Capote called Brooks's abandoned studio "the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes" and said they formed an international daisy chain of lasting influence on modern culture.

Cincinnati-born Barney was more than just a legendary seducer with an insatiable appetite for sex with beautiful women. Souhami portrays her as one of the first lifestyle mavens, a Martha Stewart prototype for living life as an art in itself. By contrast, the remote and severe Romaine never really overcame a horrific childhood of abuse by her tormented, mentally ill relatives. "My mother stands between me and life," she said long after her immensely rich and crazy mother, Ella Waterman Goddard, had died. As a child in Philadelphia, Romaine was once palmed off on the family's impoverished Irish laundress, Mrs. Hickey, as punishment for bad behavior. Ella went abroad soon thereafter on impulse without leaving money or instructions to Mrs. Hickey for Romaine's care. Months went by; Romaine became a street urchin. Adoption arrangements by a neighbor in Mrs. Hickey's tenement had already been undertaken before a family member returned to claim Romaine. She drew to get a grip on reality; in adulthood she developed into a disciplined ascetic and a successful celebrity painter. Natalie, ever a glittery surface person herself, was attracted to Romaine's body as well as the murky depths of her soul. As the tragicomic, bittersweet tale of the mutually unfaithful yet deeply committed love affair unfolds between two headstrong heiresses--the "irredeemably blond" social butterfly Natalie and Romaine, the loner and workaholic--Souhami's eye for detail brings the story up close and personal. The lovers' struggle to remain together while nurturing separate identities and managing a complex web of relationships isn't too far from the main plotline of The L Word.

Always a careful researcher, Souhami sifts through unpublished manuscripts and more than 500 letters between the lovers for perfect character sketches of Natalie, Romaine, and their cast of thousands. Even if you've come across this material before, Souhami makes it sound fresh. As for the meaning to be found in Barney and Brooks's gilded love story nearly a century later, Souhami apparently concludes that, as the French saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Wild girls just want to have fun.