Belle de Jour, the writer of an online journal describing her life as a London call girl, is quitting the website that aroused fevered speculation about her true identity and landed her a book deal.
"The time will never be right to finish the diary, so I am ending it now," Belle wrote on her website, belledejour-uk.blogspot.com, this week. "If I could add one thing, it would be this - don't ever turn down pleasure because you were afraid of what other people might say."
Belle's blog, which describes her sexual encounters with clients in sometimes explicit detail as well as her relationships with friends and lovers, entered the public eye when she won an award from the Guardian newspaper last year.
The UK press embarked on a quest to unmask her true identity, with several well-known writers "outed" only to proclaim their non-involvement.
"Yes, I really am a call girl," Belle writes on her site. "A bored journalist could probably fake this blog, but I'm not that clever."
Fans of Belle should not despair. She has a book, Belle de Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, from Weidenfeld & Nicolson, due out in January. And she hinted in her final blog entry that a TV project is in the works as well.