When Armand Pourpe's naval career led him to a billet in Marseille, Anne-Marie took a lover, Charles-Marie de Mac-Mahon, 5th marquis of Éguilly.

Deciding to leave her husband, Anne-Marie sold her rosewood piano to a young man who paid 400 francs cash for the instrument.

She preferred café-concerts and popular songs to William Shakespeare or Richard Wagner, and made minor appearances in the chorus of Folies Bergère in Paris in St. Petersburg and cabaret clubs in Rome and the French Riviera.

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".

Liane became so well known as a performer at the Folies Bergère that the 1890s English female impersonator Herbert Charles Pollitt referenced her in his drag name Diane de Rougy.

Although Pougy was one of the most famous women in France at the time, constantly sought after by wealthy and titled men, Barney's audacity charmed and seduced her.

"[8] L'Insaississable, Pougy's first novel, depicts Josiane de Valneige's quick rise to fame in Paris and "features much braggadocio" about this "grande courtisane" who "fails to find happiness through love.

"In both works, de Pougy vividly depicts the dangers, harassment, humiliation, and psychological damage endured by sex workers, an important but harsh reality never described by Zola and his coterie.

In Sensations, de Pougy recounts her alter ego demi-mondaine's rise to the top and subsequent retirement in Brittany, which is an optimistic ending on her part because it allows her courtesan heroine to not only avoid death but also escape the drudgery of prostitution.

The Catalogue général of the French National Library also lists Pougy as the author of L'enlizement, a one-act play (1900), and Ecce homo!

After her husband and she stumbled onto the Asylum of Saint Agnes while driving through Savoy in 1928, she became deeply involved in this institution devoted to the care of children with birth defects.

[14] The couple moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, during World War II where they reconnected with Fr Alexander Rzewuski, a Dominican priest who became "her confidant from whom she hoped to get help for the advancement of her religious and spiritual life.