‘The Adventure of King Pausole’- editions from 1930

Marcel Vertes, 1930

The Adventures of King Pausole (Les Aventures du Roi Pausole) was the fourth major novel written by Pierre Louys. Having first been published in 1900, it ran into five illustrated editions before the author’s death in 1925. That event inevitably encouraged publishers to rush out further editions in the years immediately afterwards. Between 1926 and the end of 1930 a further four illustrated editions appeared. 

As this post describes, the next decade was marked by another five editions and, after an inevitable lull during the Second World War, another six editions appeared after 1945. In 1930 the Hungarian Marcel Vertes provided 74 dry-point illustrations for a limited edition issue of the book.  He is faithful to the text: Pausole is rather like Henry VIII- paunchy and balding- whereas the housemaids and milkmaids are nubile young women wearing little other than headscarves and clogs.

Vertes, 1930

Tsuguharu Leonard Foujita, 1931

In 1931 an interesting edition of the book appeared, illustrated with woodcuts by a Japanese artist, Tsuguharu (Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968). As a young man, Foujita studied Western painting for five years at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. After graduation, in 1913, he travelled to Paris, where he encountered the international modern art scene in Montparnasse and, mixing with writers such as Apollinaire and artists including Modigliani, Picasso, Diego Rivera, Pierre Bonnard amongst others, developed an eclectic style that borrowed from both the Japanese and European artistic traditions. Foujita remained in Europe during World War I and, during the 1920s, became a commercial success, painting nudes, still lifes, and self-portraits.

Foujita returned to Japan in 1933 and became an official war artist during World War II. This led him to fall from favour after 1945 and, in 1950, he returned to France, where he converted to Catholicism and spent his last years painting frescoes for a small, Romanesque chapel that he built in Reims.

Foujita’s work on Pausole may reflect his financial problems at the time; he had never paid tax in France and eventually went bankrupt as a result. His illustrations give us a portly, ageing monarch, although it’s notable that a view of the harem bears some close resemblances to Japanese woodblock prints of similar scenes. Foujita also provided a single woodblock titlepage image for the first edition of Pybrac in 1927.

Daniel Girard, 1931, Galatee spying on Aline & Mirabelle

Daniel Girard (1890-1970) was a landscape painter, but mainly worked as an illustrator and engraver. Amongst the 75 works he illustrated were various titles by Daudet, Flaubert and Gide but most tellingly, he worked on erotic texts such as Le Parc aux Biches (1931) and Vie Secret Muscadin (1933) by Pierre D’Anniel , Lost Confidences by Liane Lauré (1932) and Jean Claqueret’s Clotilde et quelques autres (1935).  The last three of these were published by Jean Fort, who specialised in spanking novels; Girard was obviously perfectly happy working on such materials.

Girard, frontispiece

Lydis, 1934

Mariette Lydis, an artist who is likely to be familiar to many readers by now, was commissioned to illustrate Pausole in 1934. Once again, the king was accurately pictured as an overweight and rather self-indulgent individual and, just like Marcel Vertes, she was attracted by the image of the healthy milkmaid Thierette, a figure who symbolises the natural outdoor life of the young people of the kingdom of Trypheme.

Lydis, 1934

Jacques Touchet, 1937

Jacques Touchet (1887-1949) provided cartoons for newspaper and humorous magazines and was a prolific book illustrator who worked on over sixty titles during his career. These included erotica such as Les Quinze joies du mariage (1932) and Brantome’s Les Vies des Dames galantes (1938) as well as two editions of Roi Pausole, in 1937 and 1939, for two separate publishers. For both books he provided bright, colourful and light-hearted illustrations, well-suited to the tenor of the story; the difference between the two editions is that the 1937 one had five ‘tipped in’ (separate, single page) plates, whereas in the later edition the text fits around the 82 images.

The illustration above is an amusing representation of the courtier Giglio beginning to ingratiate himself with the Princess Aline. After she has eloped with her girlfriend, he discovers their whereabouts and helps to disguise them so that they can evade the king for a little longer (whilst Giglio works out his own plans to gain the maximum credit for finding the errant daughter and to separate her from Mirabelle). Touchet nicely catches Aline’s naivety and Mirabelle’s suspicion of Giglio’s true motives. He is also one of the few artists to accurately reflect the description of Mirabelle found in the text- that she is slim, boyish and with short dark hair.

Touchet, 1939

Suzanne Ballivet is another illustrator well known to regular visitors to the blog. Her focus was upon the sexuality of the characters, as we see in the example below of the plump king (and his serious and Puritan minister Taxis) surrounded by the young beauties of his harem. Ballivet paid particular attention to the love affair between Princess Aline and the dancer Mirabelle.

Ballivet, 1945

Henriette Bellair, 1946

Bellair (1904-63) was a painter, primarily. She was born into a creative family: her mother was a miniaturist and lithographer and her father an architect-decorator. Initially she studied literature and history before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. Having become a drawing teacher and member of the Society of French Artists , she exhibited paintings of the Breton coast and life, but also became known for her book illustrations, which included erotica such as Hughes Rebell’s Les Nuits chaudes du Cap français (1939), full of lesbian and interracial sex, as well as Pausole.

Becat, 1947

Paul-Emile Becat will also be well-known to readers. He illustrated several titles by Louys, including Bilitis, and (as ever) stuck fairly closely to the text, although his monarch is notably leaner and more distinguished than many we have seen so far.

Becat, Pausole & his new wife Philis

Poulain, 1947

Jean Poulain (1884-1967) was born in Katanga (in the former Belgian Congo). During his twenties and early thirties he travelled and explored Africa, before marrying and, from about 1920, concentrating on painting and animal illustration. His work was little known for several decades after his death but has been rediscovered and appreciated more recently. The African influence can be seen in his unique illustrations to the second edition of Pausole in 1947- such as the krar resting on top of a drum or basket/ pot on the floor. Poulain might have been chosen because of the vague location of the kingdom of Trypheme and the use of zebras and camels as beasts of burden (see the picture by Becat above; Mariette Lydis also showed one of the queens on her camel).

Touchagues 1947

Louis Touchagues (1893-1974) was a designer and illustrator, creating fabric patterns, drawing contemporary Parisian life for satirical magazines, designing sets and events and illustrating books. He received his art training in Lyons, then moved to Paris where he soon found work with couturiers and theatre directors. He drew a lot of pictures of nudes, bathers, actresses and dancers: his style has been described as “two simple, somewhat stiff lines- the stiffness one finds in the arms and legs of all young girls. A light wash and these arms, legs and torsos appear…;” his work was compared to that of Fragonard, Watteau and Toulouse-Lautrec. Touchagues illustrated books by Colette and Paul Verlaine and was evidently very well suited to working on Louys’ book. His lithographs for a 1947 edition of Pausole are pleasant depictions of the characters: the frontispiece shown above captures the indecision of the king very well.

In 1949 the publisher Albin Michel issued a five volume set of the works of Pierre Louys. These included Aphrodite, Les Chansons de Bilitis, La Femme et le pantin and collected Poëmes, illustrated respectively by J. A. Cante, Louis Icart, Jean Traynier and Louis Berthommé Saint-André. The new edition of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole was issued with a dozen plates by Georges Beuville (1902-82). He worked as an illustrator and painter, producing works for advertising, set design, newspapers, magazines, comics and cinema. He was a also a portrait painter and sculptor. His cartoon like style is well suited to the tone of the book.

Schem 1950

Lastly, Raoul Serres (known as ‘Schem’- 1881-1971) illustrated Pausole in 1950. He had previously tackled Louys’ Handbook for Young Ladies in 1946, providing a dozen watercolours with a charming and humorous take on the text with a series of brightly coloured and cartoonish images.  His approach to Roi Pausole was very similar: the plates are light-hearted and attractive, although the king appears as a rather more serious looking character in his suit and permanent cigar.

This survey of the editions of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole after 1930 underlines the bibliological and erotological significance of the remarkable number of illustrated versions of the books of Pierre Louys that were produced during the last century. The sheer number of editions and the dozens of artists involved (at least 80) make this almost a field of study in its own right- as I have tried to demonstrate with my examinations of the publishing and illustrative history of other books by the same author- Aphrodite, Bilitis, Crepuscule des nymphes and others.