All her life, unparalleled athlete Violette Morris remained the subject of scandal as she chased challenge after challenge.

Her name? Violette Morris. Champion athlete, music-hall singer, and fixture of the Parisian night scene, she numbered among her conquests entertainer Joséphine Baker and actress Yvonne de Bray, through whom she met Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais. Unique, extravagant, resolutely modern, a feminist activist and open lesbian, she aroused fear and rejection from a country still corseted in conformism, the incarnation of all its repressed demons.