The Queen and her Temple

You're standing outside 20 rue Jacob, where Natalie Clifford Barney welcomed Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald and Colette to her literary salon every Friday from 1909 until the late 1960s. But they didn't just gather in her house. They met in a mysterious Doric temple hidden in her garden.

The Temple of Friendship stands exactly 500 meters from both the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the sundial at Saint Sulpice. During World War II, Germans discovered it connected to underground passages leading beneath the Seine. The floor had a masonic star. Nobody knows for certain why.

Barney was openly lesbian when that could destroy you. At 23, she dressed as a page and knocked on the door of Paris's most famous courtesan, reciting Sappho's poetry until the woman let her in. It worked. She spent the rest of her life refusing to apologize or hide.

When she was 5, Oscar Wilde scooped her onto his lap at a New York hotel and told her a story. 40 years later, she had an affair with his niece.

At 90, new owners evicted her to renovate. She left, promising to return in spring. She died at 96 in a hotel, never seeing her temple again. The salon that had survived two world wars ended with a construction site.