Suzanne Ballivet- illustrator of Pierre Louys’ “Roi Pausole”

Ballivet, 1931

Suzanne Ballivet was a French artist and book illustrator. She was born in Paris on August 12th 1904, the only daughter of Jules and Laurentine Ballivet. Her father moved to work as a photographer in Montpellier and Suzanne became a student at the École des Beaux Arts in the town during the early 1920s. In 1927 moved to Paris to study fashion design. She began to exhibit her work at this time too and steadily developed a career as a theatrical designer and cartoonist, later becoming an illustrator. She died in 1985.

Amongst the works by Pierre Louys that Ballivet illustrated are Les Chansons de Bilitis in 1943 and Le Roi Pausole in 1945. She also supplied erotic plates for Guillaume Apollinaire’s Poesies Libres in 1948, an edition of Venus in Furs in 1954, Education de Laure (1951), Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1954), Rimbaud’s Complete Works (1959), Monsieur Nicholas (1956), Mirabeau’s Education de Laure, in which the heroine is introduced to full range of pleasures of the flesh, and for Initiation Amoureuse published in 1950. As this indicates, she was perfectly happy working with erotic and risque texts, although her sweet, naive style tended to diminish the shock value of the sexual scenes she depicted. In this she tends to stand out from the wealth of erotic book illustration that was produced in France during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

Les aventures du Roi Pausole was Pierre Louys‘ third novel, published in 1901. Having written two books set in ancient Greece (Bilitis and Aphrodite), the author’s ploy to distance himself from the potentially controversial content of his story was to locate it in an entirely fictional (if contemporary) country. The kingdom of Tryphême appears to be located between France and Spain. It’s climate is evidently very mild, as will be seen.

Aline & Mirabelle

Tryphême is ruled by King Pausole, whose adventures (nominally at least) are the subject of the book- although much of the focus is on other characters within his court. As ever with Louys, sex is lies at the heart of the story. Pausole keeps a harem, essentially: he has a wife for every day of the year and sleeps with them in a strict rotation through the calendar. Understandably, there is a good deal of rivalry and competition between the wives, as they vie for influence over the king. Any new and young wife is viewed with particular suspicion- as Harry G. Spanner’s plate from the 1927 Pierre Louys Society’s edition of the author’s work shows nicely.

Harry G. Spanner, from the Collected Works of Pierre Louys, New York, 1927

This polygamy is, perhaps, not the least of his peculiarities. He has ordained that young people in his realm should wear no more than shoes and sun hats. We hear nothing about the males, but we do hear a lot about the young girls wandering around completely naked. Predictably, they attract a lot of Louys’ attention.

Queen Philis

The story starts with the news that the king’s only daughter, Aline, has run away from the palace. Aline is fourteen years and five months old. We first meet her, examining herself nude in her mirror.

“She had passed from childhood but five weeks ago; hence came discoveries without number. Her breasts, rounded out in so short a time, preserved under her hands all the freshness of new toys. With all the familiarity (and carelessness) of the child she still was, after all, she caught at these fragile roses as if they were toy balloons; she tried to pull them together, she tickled the points of them; she teased them in a thousand ways.”

Mirabelle & a dancer

Aline is ready to discover love and, one night, she attends a ballet and falls for the young lead, who appears to be a boy- but is in fact a dancer called Mirabelle. They meet and immediately decide to run away together- an impulsive decision by Aline perhaps, but entirely satisfactory to Mirabelle:

“Mirabelle utterly failed to sense the attractions of the male of the species… Her conception of love assumed a technique still more delicate and her conception of art was founded on symmetry.

These ideas, supported by the warmth of natural leaning, had led the little dancing girl to seek voluptuousness amongst a small circle of girl friends. Prudent, she had commenced with her young companions first at school and then in the corps de ballet. The answer had always been ‘ yes’ either by voice, gesture or look according to individual modesty. Some accepted without any idea of cultivating a soulful passion, but none knew how to resist the attraction of an inoffensive and clandestine experience.

Six months after her first appearance on the stage her reputation was great as was that of her theatre. She invited people to call on her. She even had a ‘ day at home ’ when she assembled at her house, in a very nude intimacy, ten or twelve friends who thought it useless to hide from each other their common tastes. And these parties became sufficiently scandalous to tempt honest women.

Mirabelle, extremely flattered, threw herself into the adventure. Soon tired of her early and modest partners who, however, should have deserved a less cavalier treatment, she left the stage for the auditorium with the wings of a butterfly. Innumerable revelations still awaited her, and she wanted them all. She had them. She knew the joys of adultery, the narrowness of a cab, the scent of a furnished room, the all too short hour, the invented name and the poste restante. A husband once entered a private toom where, in spite of there being no man — and no bed — he declared himself supplanted. Mirabelle could hardly contain herself with joy : so great is the unconsciousness of crime.”

So, the two girls elope together and the entire court is thrown into confusion, before the king decides to try to pursue the couple and to rescue his daughter from her unknown abductor (who’s assumed to be a man). This journey, which takes Pausole and his trusted advisers to the capital city of his small kingdom, involves a good deal of amorous adventuring with those naked local girls.

Aline & Mirabelle

Aline, meanwhile, being so young and completely naive, seems a little unsure whether her partner is another female or a man. In due course, she should be left in no doubt:

“Aline had a grateful heart. She clasped her bare arms round the neck of her friend, gave a few kisses more sonorous than voluptuous; then slowly turned Mirabelle’s head so as to place the ear on her mouth and offered her without any preamble all that the girl could want to satisfy her temptations.

Mirabelle needed no further pressing. Having shown for twelve hours all the discretion of which she was capable, she believed she had reached the extreme limit of reserve and that now she could be allowed to show herself at last just how the gods had made her.

Her frankness, for four hours, showed itself in all aspects. After several endearments which shook the foundations of her young and ready emotion, Aline stated that she was decidedly exhausted, and that she would not have the strength even to get up for lunch.”

Very soon after this marathon sex session, the story resolves itself. A clever young courtier called Giglio knows the girls’ secrets and has, in fact, assisted with their elopement. This turns out to be part of a larger scheme for his own advancement at court. He manages to separate the young lovers, restoring the princess to her father whilst, at the same time, winning her heart for himself. Aline’s strange and abrupt change of attachment and sexuality is not properly explained; Mirabelle, meanwhile, is introduced to a new lover called Galatee by the enterprising young man: she is told by Giglio to meet another girl running away from her family under a statue of Felicien Rops (an erotic illustrator) in the city’s main park. “That same evening the twain accomplished their union unto dizzy dreams of supreme sensation and they did not realise of what a loyal and tender love this tearful embrace was knotting the first strands of remembrance.” 

Galatee’s younger sister, Philis, meanwhile becomes a new royal wife and member of the court harem. Ballivet depicts her (above) as rather innocent and starry eyed. I wonder, too, if her hat and fingerless mittens are a reference to the painting Cherry Ripe by John Millais; the same simple naivety might be shared between the two subjects.

Aline & Mirabelle

The Adventures are a light hearted romp. They don’t have the emotional depth of Bilitis or Aphrodite, nor do they set out to shock challenge and possibly offend like Pybrac. Nonetheless, as one editor wrote in 1927, Louys’ “fondness for the theme of tribadism is striking. It is woven in to thread of the narrative of Aphrodite and forms the staple of Bilitis. But he invariably exalts it to the plane of emotional romance…” In the alternative reality of Tryphême, same sex love is just an accepted part of the diversity of human life and attracts no condemnation or rejection. Well, this is true of the author and most of the characters- except for Pausole’s Puritan counsellor Taxis. He has forbidden the harem to sleep together in twos to prevent “opportunities for straying into certain insane practices which I am, to be sure, not authorised by the king to forbid you but which I must nevertheless declare on my own responsibility to be abominable.” He also labels the practices ‘perversion,’ but Taxis is a figure of contempt and loathing throughout the book, so we may assume that his views don’t reflect those of the population as a whole- nor, it appears, the king, who might conceivably have wished to keep his wives chastely faithful.

Equally, the naked body is regarded as beautiful rather than shameful and polygamy and polyandry are happily practised by the ordinary people as well as the monarch. Perhaps this liberated and relaxed country was Louys’ ideal world.

Becat- Giglio helps to disguise Aline

Suzanne’s Ballivet’s illustrations for this edition are notable for the fine draughtsmanship and their sensitive representations of young girls making love. Other illustrators of Louys’ novel, such as Paul-Emile Becat, also worked on Roi Pausole and gave more attention to other characters, but Ballivet focussed primarily on Mirabelle, Aline and other girls, her pencil illustrations being tender, delicate and passionate. For more information on the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography page. For more general information, see my recommended reading page.