Barnes’s faux-medieval chapbook is a satirical but affectionate portrait of the Parisian lesbian salon of Natalie Clifford Barney, here renamed Dame Evangeline Musset. Insistently bawdy, with the most lightly veiled descriptions of a wide variety of sexual contact between women, it nevertheless evaded legal censure by its indirect language. In contrast to other works in this section, Barnes rigorously avoids defining the sexual identity of her characters, focusing rather on their pleasures; she similarly refused to define herself through her own most significant relationship, to artist Thelma Wood, insisting ‘I’m not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma.’