The legacies of Louys

I have written at length on the books and poetry of Pierre Louys- and the illustrated editions of those works. It is fair for readers to ask why? What is this little known writer’s significance? Here, I shall try to justify that.

In literary terms, in his time, Louys was a best selling author and an influence on André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé; moreover, the other French authors regarded him at the time as a writer of major significance. However, it has been said that these writers came to overshadow that of their mentor and friend. The Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests that “Louÿs’ popularity, which rested more on his eroticism than on purely aesthetic grounds, has faded.” I hesitate fully to endorse this statement, as the most erotic of Pierre Louys work only emerged after his death when his unpublished and unknown manuscripts began to emerge. Before that, works like Pausole, Bilitis, Aphrodite, Crepuscule des nymphes and La femme et le pantin, whilst having some ‘adult’ passages, were also rightly extolled for their purely literary merits- and still deserve a readership for that reason today.

In his time, the fact that he wrote Les Chansons de Bilitis and was friendly with and supportive of the lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney was significant for helping a distinctively lesbian artistic culture to first emerge. The book itself gave its name in 1955 to the Daughters of Bilitis, one of the first lesbian organisations campaigning for civil and political rights in the USA. Now, whilst it is fair to admit that a stereotypical heterosexist male fascination with female same-sex relationships plays an undoubted role in the composition of Bilitis and other works, there was more to it than that. As professor of French Tama Lea Engelking has observed, both Louys and Barney “looked toward ancient Greece for a model of how open-minded and tolerant she wished society would be… [they were] both enthralled by the hedonistic sensuality they associate with Hellenism in contrast to Christianity’s disdain for the body.” Each of these writers were somewhat ahead of their times in their views. In the case of Louys, his liking for eroticism and his tendency to seek to provoke can deflect from his message; by employing the medium of erotica to convey challenging concepts, he risks alienating audiences who do not see beyond his parodies and jokey filth to the serious social philosophy beyond. Louys’ views on diversity and tolerance remain valid.

As I have described previously, a number of Louys books formed the basis for musical works, such as Debussy’s songs based upon Les Chansons de Bilitis or the plays and operas based upon Aphrodite and La Femme et le pantin. The latter novel also translated to film, directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 and Bunuel in 1977. In 1933, Alexis Granowsky made a feature film based on Roi Pausole. In that same posting, I illustrated the sculpture of Aphrodite that Louys’ friend Rodin created for the staging of the play based upon the author’s second novel. Many of my postings have examined the graphic art impact of Louys.

Book Illustration

To repeat what I have emphasised before: the sixteen different published works of Louys have generated nearly 150 different editions, illustrated by over one hundred artists. When we appreciate that there are only four illustrated versions of Apollinaire, twenty-one editions of various works by Paul Verlaine and a roughly similar number of editions of de Sade, we begin to appreciate what a significant body of books this represents. It is testament (of course) to interest in the writings of Louys, but it is indisputably a major source of evidence on the evolution in graphic styles over the last century and a quarter.

Some artists may be especially defined through their work on volumes of Louys’ prose and poetry. Leading examples include Mariette Lydis, who worked on five editions of his books; Edouard Chimot likewise illustrated five different titles, whilst Paul-Emile Becat, Marcel Vertes and Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre all illustrated four different works. Amongst those who illustrated three works by Louys are Andre Collot and Rojan. The art generated in response to Louys’ writing was significant at the time in terms of what it told us about aesthetic developments and the public’s literary and artistic tastes (and, therefore, about deeper cultural developments). It remains of importance today: there is still considerable and active interest in these illustrated volumes, as evidenced by the regular sales of Louys’ books by auction houses such Christies, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Drouot in Paris.

Painters

The artistic inspiration of Louys extended beyond book plates, as I have mentioned previously. Jules Pascin painted a scene from Roi Pausole and Paul Albert Laurens designed a set of etchings of Aphrodite that were not destined for an actual edition of the book. In 1942, the American painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) painted a Homage to Pierre Louys– the picture was recently sold by Bonhams- the canvas was reused three years later for another picture, hence its rather odd appearance at the back of the frame of the second work.

Homage to Pierre Louys

Levy-Dhurmer, Bilitis, 1900

It is Les Chansons de Bilitis which has had the greatest artistic impact of all Louys writings. I have described before how British photographer David Hamilton very freely adapted the book into a film and a photo album. From a date soon after the book’s publication, in fact, the story was a source of inspiration for visual artists. The Symbolist Lucien Levy-Dhurmer (1865-1953) drew a beautiful pastel image of Bilitis as early as 1900. Others that have been equally inspired include George Auriol (1863–1938), who was a poet, songwriter, graphic designer, type designer and Art Nouveau artist. He created illustrations for the covers of magazines, books, and sheet music; these include a floral cover and a wonderful Japanese print inspired portrait of Bilitis. Secondly, just like Levy-Dhurmer, the Polish painter Stanisław Eleszkiewicz (1900-63)- who had lived in Paris since 1923- was inspired to create a study of Bilitis and a lover (presumably Mnasidika).

Auriol, Bilitis a la japonaise

Stanisław Eleszkiewicz, study for Bilitis

Erté designed a series of costumes for a production of Les Rois des Légendes (Legendary Kings) at La Marche a l’Etiole Femina Theatre, Paris, in 1919, one of which represented a jocular Roi Pausole in flamboyant Middle Eastern/ Babylonian robes. The photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue also took a series of photographs on set at the filming of “The Adventures of King Pausole” on the Cote d’Azur in 1932, a production for which he was assistant director. The French sculptor and painter Theo Tobiasse (1927-2012) in 2011 created a bronze sculpture based on the story.

Lartigue’s photo of King Pausole’s harem of queens, 1932

Conclusions

Louys continues to have a cultural impact. In July 1988, in Rome, the premiere took place of Aphrodite (which described itself as a ‘Monodramma di costumi antichi’- a piece for a solo performer in antiwue dress) with the music and libretto composed by Giorgio Battistelli. In 2019 there appeared Curiosa, Lou Jeunet’s French film depicting the complex relationship between Henri Regnier, his wife Marie (nee Heredia) and Louys. Pierre and Marie conducted a protracted affair, both before and after her marriage to Louys’ friend Regnier.

Pierre & Marie from Curiosa, 2019

What then, is the legacy of Pierre Louys? I would argue that it is manifold: Louys was- first and foremost (of course)- a talented writer, immensely skilled in versification, capable of compelling plots. His works formed the vehicle for more though: examinations of religion, morality and social relationships; ideas for the ideal form of the state and government. This wasn’t just theory, as we’ve seen, but had real, practical results. What’s more, and for the very reason that he was a notable author and poet, he inspired others artists- composers, playwrights, painters, illustrators, sculptors, film makers, photographers- to create their own works. This seems, to me, an impressive record, nearly a century after his death.

For more on the writing of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography of his work; for details of my own writings on his novels and poems, see my books page.

‘Three daughters and their mother’- scandal and complexity from Pierre Louys

Teresa & family by Edouard Chimot

During the last decade and a half of his career, Pierre Louys completed three major works- the Handbook of Manners for Young Ladies, which was a parody of deportment manuals; the novel Trois Filles de leur mere, and the poetry collection Pybrac. It is arguable, in fact, Pybrac was never actually completed, in the sense that Louys added continually to the quatrains that comprise it and the published versions of the book only include a fraction of the total known number of verses. There were, in addition, several unfinished works: the novels Toinon and L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve and the mock-travelogue/ novel L’Ile aux dames. These texts all have a number of themes in common: Louys’ encyclopaedic literary knowledge coupled with a tendency to mock those books; his filthy sense of humour; the utopian strand to his writing, and his liking for erotica.

Here, I focus on Trois Filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of Their Mother), arguably one of the most difficult books by Louys. This considerable difficulty for readers arises from the tension between the surface content of the text- some of his obscenest erotica- and the deeper purposes of his writing.

Louys had a number of aims and targets in writing Trois Filles. He felt a deep antipathy for the stifling morals and conventions of the Catholic church within which he’d been raised (hence his regular recreations of the pagan faith of classical Greek and Roman seen in several of his works) and it’s clear that the book is, in part, an assault upon many of the sacraments and concepts of the faith: the story features sex in a church, a vicious parody of communion, and a perverse immaculate conception, for example. One of the three daughters, Charlotte, is something of a martyr-figure, and it’s even arguable, I think, that the mother, Teresa, stands as a satanic temptress figure for her trinity of girls. Amongst the other targets for Louys’ derision, alongside casual piety, were French wine snobbery and the general bourgeois mood of propriety.

In addition, the book is deeply literary. There are repeated references to classical and Renaissance and later French authors, such as Clement Marot (1496-1544) or La Fontaine, which readers are expected, implicitly, to know. Some of these sources are quoted, some are parodied and mocked. An obscene passage is attributed to the Humanist scholar Erasmus, which I’m sure he never wrote (although I’ll confess I’ve not checked all 86 volumes of his collected works). One contemporary French writer is condemned as merely deadly dull (just as was the case with the moralist Guy du Faur in Pybrac): after a rather overstimulating session with the mother, Teresa, the student narrator concludes “I took from my library a ‘heady’ novel by Henri Bourdeaux that I had purchased especially for the purpose of calming myself down when I was in a worked-up state.” Bourdeaux (1870-1963) was a lawyer and author known for his traditional Catholic morality and his very correct French style.

Besides citing classical authors, Louys borrowed themes from them just as he modelled parts of his plot on the Bible. Hence, we find traces of Leda, Pasiphae and Europa in some of the incidents described.

René Ranson’s title page

The book is also ‘metatextual’ before that term was invented. It is repeatedly aware that it is a story, pretending to be a memoire. For example, the student narrator addresses us, as readers, explaining “I would have taken much more pleasure in inventing a story where I could give myself (so easily) a more sympathetic role” or “That’s the trouble with memoires: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted.” When a play is acted out in the final chapters of the book, the artificiality of that make-believe within the wider pretence of the story-telling is continually highlighted, the use of dramatic jargon constantly reminding us that it is all invented and staged: for example “Teresa probably did not know that she had introduced a prosopopoeia into her speech, but there is no need to know the figures of rhetoric to put them… at the service of persuasion. Was it the apostrophe, the hypothesis, the exhortation or the prosopopoeia that won? I do not know…” Very evidently, this sort of passage is not part of standard work of pornography.

The text can be understood at several levels simultaneously, I would argue. The basic plot concerns a student who moves into a new flat next door to Teresa and her three daughters and discovers that all four are sex workers. A few weeks of uninhibited sensual indulgence with the entire family follows, before they suddenly disappear. The novel may be interpreted as a condemnation of the sex trade and its malign impact upon the women trapped within it. At the same time, though, there are elements of the narrative which celebrate female sexual autonomy and women’s right to control over their bodies and their pleasures. Teresa is proud of her physical prowess; she comes over as a powerful and determined woman- except that the downside of her assertiveness is the fact that she dominates her family and is involved in damaging incestuous relationships with all of them. Then again- as he often did- Louys seems to suggest that self-sufficient lesbian households may represent some sort of social utopia– an ideal of independence and happiness. Yet he also interrogates lesbian or bisexual identity, perhaps ultimately tending towards a position that sexual fluidity is a more accurate way of understanding individuals.

On its face, Trois Filles may appear outrageously, shockingly pornographic, but I think it’s plain that any text that casually mentions Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue, Roman poet Tibullus, the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Melisandre, and the painter Ingres, has depths and intentions that are not instantly obvious. The complex and multi-faceted nature of Trois Filles means that we are constantly left unbalanced by it, not quite sure of Louys’ meaning, uncertain whether he is playing a game and always returning to the text to uncover new layers of significance.

As ever, I find the novel’s bibliology as fascinating as the book itself. Illustrated editions proved extremely popular with publishers and several artists whom we’ve already encountered before, because of their work on texts by Louys, were commissioned to provide imagery. The first edition of Trois Filles was released by Pascal Pia in 1926, with twenty plates by Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre. Further illustrated editions followed in due course: in 1930, with plates by Andre Collot; in 1935, illustrated with sixteen etchings by Marcel Vertes and in 1936, with 34 watercolours by René Ranson (1891-1977). Ranson was one of the most important designers at work during the interwar heyday of the Parisian music hall, working for the Folies Bergère between 1924 and 1932. Renowned for his draughtsmanship, he was a painter, illustrator and costume designer as well. Ranson also supplied designs to the Paris Opera, and for several film studios, including Fox, Pathé and Paramount. Over and above his theatrical work, Ranson painted glamour or pin-up nudes and provided plates for works such as Baudelaire’s Fleur du mal. In past posts I’ve remarked on the frequency with which cartoonists and caricaturists found work as illustrators- and, for that matter, how often the skills acquired in illustrating children’s books might be transferred to the distinctly adult content of the works of Pierre Louys. René Ranson demonstrates how theatrical and costume designers might find additional work in book illustration; other examples I’ve noted previously include George Barbier, Louis Touchagues and Andre Dignimont. All of them surely deserve our respect for their multi-talented ability to turn their hands to almost any artistic commission offered to them.

After the end of the Second World War, further editions of Trois Filles followed: Jean Berque provided sixteen plates for an issue in 1955 and, late that same year, Edouard Chimot also illustrated an edition with a dozen plates (see head of page for the family in their best ‘New Look’ dresses). Then, in 1960, an edition illustrated by Rojan was published. Finally, as I have mentioned several times, a version illustrated by graphic novel artist Georges Pichard appeared in 1980. In all these cases, the illustrators were faithful after their own style to the text they were commissioned to work upon, meaning that in most cases the plates are not really suitable for publication on WordPress. This explicitness can- as I’ve suggested- have its own implications for the text that the images accompany. Pichard, used to multiple frames in cartoon strips, designed an impressive fifty-three plates to go with Louys’ book. The sheer number of these, coupled with his graphic style of strongly drawn images, has the effect of underlining the more bleak and depraved aspects of the book. His monochrome plates emphasise the elements of tragedy and desperation in the narrative- something that Chimot’s and Ranson’s very pretty coloured illustrations definitely do not do.

This post is a simplified version of a longer, fully annotated essay on the novel that can be downloaded from my Academia page. I have also written there in detail on Louys’ attitudes towards religion. For readers who are interested, several translations of the book are readily available, the most recent being Her Three Daughters, available from Black Scat books (published December 2022). See as well my Louys bibliography and details of my other writing on the author.

The cover of Pichard’s edition

Pierre Louys- Poesy & Poems

Here I gather together various illustrated volumes of the ‘adult’ poetry of Pierre Louys. I have mentioned already the 1930 translation entitled Satyrs and Women, which covered his collected verse from 1890 to 1901, shortly before he ceased to publish. Much more verse was written subsequently, but little appeared until after his death.

Maddalou was once such post-mortem find, being published in Paris in 1927, two years after Louys’ had died. Its title page describes it as a poeme inedit– an unedited poem- although the text I have seen indicates it is either a short story or, perhaps, a ‘prose poem.’ It was illustrated with coloured lithographs by Edouard Degaine (1887-1967), an impressionist and modernist painter. Over his career, he painted landscapes, portraits, still lifes and mythical scenes in a surprising variety of styles: his delicate nudes in this book are very pleasing. This sole edition of Maddalou is extremely rare, having been published in a limited run of 400 boxed copies.

The book begins: “At the end of the long path which winds between the bushes, I discovered a hovel in the middle of a small garden. A hovel that no one knew, far from hamlets, far from the roads. Never a tourist, a hunter, never a passer-by had walked there.” An old woman and a young girl live there, the latter being “a very strange young girl, with rags like a savage and a body so beautiful that I felt myself go pale.” This is Maddalou, who “with such black hair, barely covers herself with a red rag which, pierced, torn, slashed, wraps over her chest, and hangs down to her slender heels.” She is content in her tattered rags, she thinks of them like lace and she lives happily with the goats and the mice.

The content of Louys’ collection of Poesies Erotiques (Erotic Verse) hardly needs to be described; the book is a collection of sixty-four explicit and obscene verses, many of them dialogues between lovers. The book first appeared in a highly limited edition of forty-four in 1927, but several illustrated versions followed.  In 1932, Marcel Vertès (1895-1961) tackled a new edition, printed in a limited run of 165 copies allegedly in Barcelona, but actually issued in Paris.  Vertès provided thirty-two engravings that fully portrayed the range of unconventional sexual tastes described in the text. In 1937, the Russian illustrator Rojan provided seventy-three explicit illustrations for a further edition of the poems, which combined the sepia drawings with a reproduction of the poet’s handwritten text.  A third regular illustrator of Louys’ works, Louis Berthommé Saint-André created drawings for a further edition in 1946.  His twenty dry-point plates are as explicit as those of his predecessors- which may be why the book claims to have been published in Chihuahua Mexico. Like its predecessors, pretending that a Parisian publisher was not involved was a way of trying to avoid censorship and prosecution.

Saint-Andre, Poëmes

In 1949 Berthomme Saint-Andre also illustrated an edition of Louys’ Poëmes, a collection that included verse from across his career, including Astarte, Iris, Aquarelles passionees, Hivernales, La Foret des Nymphes, Stances, Derniers Vers, Poëmes Divers and Fragments. The title page is illustrated at the head of the page. One of those forest nymphs is illustrated below.

Louys’ own illustrated copy of Astarte, presented to his father in law and reminding us of the author’s own artistic skills

Saint-Andre, Poëmes

Louys’ Poèmes érotiques inédits also appeared in 1945 with a preface by Georges Hugnet and twelve lithographs by Pierre Belotti. The choice of artist is extremely interesting: he is mainly associated with the illustration of spanking literature, a thriving trade in Paris, as a result of which the name we have is a pseudonym and his real identity is still unknown. Other books Belotti worked on include Cuisant noviciat (‘The Flaming Novice’ 1934)- still considered to be one of the classics of 1930s spanking literature- Moi, poupée (‘Me, The Doll,’ 1930), Jacinthe, ou les images de péché (‘Jacinthe, or the Images of Sin,’ 1934) and Gouvernante et gouvernée (The Governess and the Governed,’ 1936).  The titles make clear what you’ll find inside, which is lots of corporal punishment, especially in girls’ boarding schools, which was Belotti’s specialism.

Belotti was ideally suited to the material in Poèmes érotiques inédits, which is typical of Louys: The Little Laundry Delivery Girl is a dialogue between a male client and the errand girl, whom he’s trying to seduce; she turns out to be more than a match for him. At the State School dramatises a form teacher handing out marks for calculus: the girls all have excuses for their poor results and all of them are obscene… needless to say, Belotti’s lithographs match the text.

I will also mention here a very early work of Louys Les Memoires de Josephine, suivi de Filles de Ferme et de Paroles (The Memoires of Josephine, followed by Farm Girls and Conversations, 1894). Some of this comprises prose, but the second part of ‘Farm Girls’ is a dramatic prose poem. The entire book is a wild lesbian fantasy and, as such, has rarely been published. A 1984 reprint was accompanied by half a dozen highly explicit etchings by Ginko Honjo an artist whose name may well be a pseudonym and who does not seem to have worked on any other books. The frontispiece comprises a portrait of Louys, with a number of naked girls in the background. This echoes not just the author’s preoccupations but some of his own nude drawings, which are now published in an edition of his love poetry titled La Femme.

For more on Louys see my bibliography of his work and for further writing on the themes of his poems and prose, see my books.

On Leda, Pasiphaë and Little Red Riding Hood- modern uses of ancient myth

Valentin Serov, The Rape of Europa, 1910

In a recent posting I examined the late nineteenth century fascination with Gustave Flaubert’s story of Salammbô– and the wider contemporary interest in representations of sinful women involved with serpents. These images were just one facet of a larger theme in western art. 

In truth, depictions of cross-species relationships are nothing new in the history of human imagination. They have an ancient and classical pedigree. We need only think of the myths of Leda and the Swan, or of Europa and the Bull, in both of which Zeus took animal form in order to get close to women. Most memorable is the case of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, who had a wooden cow constructed for her by Daedalus so that she could couple with a bull, a union which gave rise to the hybrid Minotaur. Classical literature was just as outrageous, as, for example, in Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Book 10, c.22). Ancient art too unashamedly depicted such scenes, as in the famous Greek sculpture of Pan and a She Goat. In more recent British folklore, sexual relationships between humans and selkies (seal-folk), leading to part-seal/ part-human offspring, are quite common. This is a theme which has plainly engaged our imaginations for millennia.

Masson, Pasiphae, 1942

These myths have long contributed subjects and themes to fine art. Pasiphaë and the bull have been painted by Symbolist Gustave Moreau, John Buckland-Wright and, most notably, by the French Surrealist Andre Masson who, from 1932 onwards, produced a series of studies of the myth and, in turn, inspired Jackson Pollock to do so. We should also note Matisse’s lino-cuts of the Pasiphaë story that he designed to accompany an edition of de Montherlant’s play of the same name in 1944. Felix Labisse’s Strange Leda of 1950 is a late Surrealist exploration of the myth of nymph and swan, but in this case, Leda herself partly metamorphoses into the animal that molests her.

Jackson Pollock, Pasiphaë, 1943

Labisse, Strange Leda, 1950

Other artists have appropriated the classical story lines but relocated them to more familiar stories and settings. For example, in 1930 the Paris-based Russian artist Rojan (Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky-1891-1970) produced a series of illustrations of an adult re-imagining of Le Petit chaperone rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) in which the interaction between the girl and the wolf becomes more a matter of Greek myth than familiar fairy-tale. Subsequently, in 1935, the artist revert to classical precedent when he produced a portfolio based on Apuleius’ L’ane d’or (The Golden Ass) that depicted the episode in the book involving a taboo relationship with a man metamorphosed into the titular quadruped (see too Rojan’s Zoo (1937)). Most surprisingly perhaps, Rojan then moved to the United States and established himself as a leading illustrators of children’s books, leaving far behind this rather troubling period in his early career.

Rojan

Rojan was far from being alone in producing such material at the time. Whilst these themes have clear classical precedents, we might trace them most directly in French literature from the famed and scandalous Gamiani of 1833, a book generally ascribed to Alfred de Musset. The novel concerns the Comtesse Gamiani and her unbridled sexuality; the text features a lot of straight and lesbian sex, but also, disturbingly, scenes that reference and develop Apuleius. Gamiani‘s particular shock value seems to have lain in the way that it used the classical myths and classical storylines. Ancient models help to justify or make familiar and respectable what otherwise would seem wholly unacceptable. It appears that de Musset’s book helped to have establish something of a malign precedent in French literature; it was soon followed by Théophile Gautier’s Le petit chien de la marquise (The Marchioness’ Lap-Dog, 1836). These themes didn’t go away, but persisted into the next century. This was, I suspect, a reflection of new attitudes to human nature that emerged from the middle of the Victorian era onwards: Darwin’s work started to demolish the idea that humans were created distinct from other animals and that we were somehow superior to them; rather, our common descent meant that we shared many characteristics with ‘wild beasts.’ Secondly, Freud’s investigations into the human psyche revealed how much we are driven by subconscious and instinctual desires. This less separate- and less noble- view of human nature appears to have fed back from science into art; perhaps this is part of the message of Labisse’s Leda: that she is not at some levels so different from the bird.

In the writing of Pierre Louys- notably in his novel Trois filles de leur mere, which was written- but not published- in about 1914, the author indulged in a few scandalous scenes, albeit- as I’ve indicated previously– in such an exaggerated manner that I think they should be understood as hyperbolic parodies of Gamiani and the classical myths that Louys knew so well- and of Pasiphaë in particular. The purpose of the scenes was also to highlight the abuse and exploitation- even ‘martyrdom’- of the one of the book’s characters. Similar incidents are also to be found in some of Louys’ poetry collections, such as Pybrac and, in his Twilight of the Nymphs, Louys presented his own reworkings of various classical myths- including that of Leda. These scenes were, in turn, illustrated by the artists who worked on editions of his books- for instance, Paul-Albert Laurens, Leda & the Swan, 1898, Louis Berthomme-Saint Andre, Jean Berque, Marcel Vertes and Georges Pichard for Trois filles, by Rojan for an edition of Louys’ Poésies érotiques in 1937, and by Vertes for Pybrac in 1928.

Paul-Albert Laurens, Leda & the Swan, from Pierre Louys, The Twilight of the Nymphs, 1898

Hard to understand as it is, this sort of material would seem to have had a market- both texts and, more problematically still, images. Various other artists included scenes which were reminiscent of the myths of Leda and Pasiphaë, but which did not illustrate or draw upon them- in collections they published: examples include several of the portfolios by von Bayros, André Collot’s Jeunesse from 1933, a plate in Rojan’s illustrations for Renée Dunan’s novel Dévergondages (‘Wantonness’ or ‘Immoral Behaviours’) of 1948 or Jean Dulac’s 1952 plates for Trente et quelques attitudes. I personally struggle to understand the demand for such material that led to such a flow of books and art work from the presses (although the editions were very likely to have been quite limited), but they must be seen as depressing evidence of a high degree of very unpleasant misogyny. This probably tells us a lot about extremely regrettable male attitudes towards women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These books and illustrations may seem more outrageous to us because they do not seek to depict the mythology or to imitate classical settings, but this should probably not distract us from the very deep-rooted misogyny and gynophobia for which the Greek myths may also be evidence. 

The ancient myths remain powerful and fascinating. They are valuable vehicles that enable us to discuss many difficult aspects of human nature and, as such, they continue to provide inspiration even into the twenty-first century. Contemporary South African artist Diane Victor frequently references Greek mythology in her work, including Leda and the White-Backed Vulture, Endangered Liaisons- The Lady and the Rhino (2004) and Pasiphae (2001/2, reworked 2003). I am also a great admirer of the work American graphic artist and painter Stu Mead, who has long confronted issues of masculinity in his work. He clearly has a broad knowledge of themes and precedents in art history and borrows subtly but cleverly from the Greek and Roman canon, from classically inspired works of the Renaissance, and from more contemporary images such as film and musical. Accordingly, Mead has adopted the narrative traditions and the iconographical lineage of ancient mythology, but has relocated these ancient themes within a modern context- as we see in his allusion to Leda below.

For more information, see my recommended reading page.

Stu Mead: a modern version of the myth of Leda?

Andre Collot- from de Sade to Louys

André Collot (1897-1976) was a French painter, engraver and illustrator, who was active from the 1930s. His early work was in a colourful art deco style, depicting topographic views, the natural world and allegorical or mythical scenes and he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Artistes Independents during 1942 and 1943. Before and after the Second World War, he produced a large number of illustrations, sometimes for undated works, some of which were published clandestinely. He also illustrated fine art editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, Francois Villon, Don Quixote, Henri Barbusse’s war novel, Marco Polo, Rabelais, Moliere, Aristophanes, Goethe, Aesop, Jules Verne, Ovid and Anatole France. In 1943 he illustrated Rene Maran’s Animals of the Bush and he also found work designing posters.

from the Works of Francois Villon, 1942

Collot was especially known for his erotic drawings and book illustrations, particularly those for Pascal Pia’s notorious La Semaine secrète de Sapho–La Chronique des Dames Contemporaines in 1929- a work which established his reputation in this field- and subsequently Les Voyeurs (whose title speaks for itself) in 1930, one hundred and twenty engravings of Casanova’s Memoirs (1932), as well as plates for Gamiani and Jeunesse (both 1933), a collection titled Seduction-Young Lovers (1939) and, in 1945, his Thirty One Mottos for Big Boys. His eight colour plates for Pia are explicit and erotic- as were those that followed, all with a strong lesbian emphasis. Collot’s designs don’t always set out to be entirely realistic, but they benefit from bold, simple lines and strong design style that he developed from the ’30s onwards. As will also be seen, he was able to work in a variety of markedly distinct graphic styles and media, this flexibility helping to respond more sensitively to different texts.

Illustration from edition of Balzac, Les Contes drolatiques, 1934

His work on the preceding texts stood Collot in very good stead for approaching his subsequent commissions, working on the works of Pierre Louys. Successively, Collot illustrated the poet’s erotic Biblical parody Aux temps de juges (1933), Pybrac/ Pibrac in 1933 (alongside Berthomme Saint-Andre), an edition of Aphrodite in 1948 and the graphic sexual poems of Douze Douzains de Dialogues in an edition of 1950. Such is the explicit nature of so much of Collot’s work that it’s not really feasible to reproduce here- but it’s readily found on art auction websites.

Chapter head from Louys, Aux Temps des juges

As part of the publishing sector that thrived in interwar Paris, Collot also found work on the flood of spanking and flagellation texts that were produced, for instance in his illustrations to the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journees de Sodome (1931), a text which was unknown until the Surrealists recovered it in the late 1920s, at the same time as restoring de Sade’s reputation as a serious writer and philosopher. Collot’s preparedness to deal with some of the more niche aspects of sexuality, apparent from his faithful reproduction of scenes from de Sade, is further proved by some of his own portfolios- Viol (Rape) of 1927, Leurs rêves (1929) and the aptly named Le monde brutal (1934). As the first indicates, the dreams (rêves) that are given visual form here fully represent the brutal world of the final collection. His images are violent, non-consensual, sexist, ageist and racist. Collot’s Symphonies amoureuses (1960) is likewise full of challenging imagery, albeit not so extreme.

Collot is most interesting for what his output shows us about French literary publishing and erotic illustration in the decades after 1930. He was presented frequently with quite explicit texts and responded to them as frankly and honestly as they demanded. Within a fine art context, this was perfectly acceptable. His own output, in fact, was even more daring. For further discussion of his book illustrations, see my essay ‘In the Garden of Aphrodite.’ See too my Pierre Louys bibliography.

Carlo/ Charleno- leading Parisian illustrator

My recent research has led me onto the track of the illustrator called ‘Carlo.’ He is regarded as one of the two or three most talented and striking artists who provided illustrations to the French erotic book trade in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. His work is held in the highest esteem along with that of Cheri Herouard and another more mysterious illustrator called ‘Wighead.’ Carlo is celebrated for his strong lines and forms, which are nonetheless coupled with the most delicate treatment of fabrics such as lace and satin and, most importantly, a unique and bold imaginative vision.

Surprisingly, though, despite his popularity with the book buying public at the time, and the subsequent collectability of his illustrations, very little is known about Carlo; all that can be stated with any confidence is the dates when he was active: between about 1910 and the mid-1930s. Readers may sometimes see these given as birth and death dates of 1900 to 1930; this can be disregarded. Whoever our artist was, he must have been born around 1890, if not earlier, to become old enough and skilled enough to find employment by the second decade of the twentieth century. We simply don’t know why his output ceased in 1936.

Based upon the close similarities of style, as well as of name, it is almost certain that a number of cartoons that were signed by ‘Charléno,’ and which appeared in satirical and humorous magazines such as Le Rire and Sans-Gêne from around 1912 until the late 1920s, are by the same individual. They are drawn in the same clear manner and the female bodies and hair are handled in the same manner. Charleno’s cartoons were often mildly risqué or sexual, as in Admiring Her Legs or Ou est le feu? of 1917, in which a girl in her apartment, wearing only her stockings, is confronted with a fireman brandishing the nozzle of his hose…. etc etc etc.

The artist who had traded as Charleno seems to have started calling himself ‘Carlo,’ or even just ‘C,’ in 1931, when he began providing illustrations for the erotic publishers Librairie Générale. By the end of 1936, when the last ‘Carlo’-illustrated title appeared, he had produced an astonishing total of some three hundred drawings for at least thirty different books. The output of books is also notable: given their nature- S&M and fetish fiction for an adult market- they tended to be quickly produced, quite repetitive and, inevitably, rarely great works of literature. Some have suggested that teams of authors worked on them to keep up with demand, something that may have produced the word counts required but probably didn’t do very much for sophisticated characterisation or complexity of plots.

Most of Carlo’s work illustrated texts by ‘Alan Mac Clyde;’ as you’ll see, he was also writing under a pseudonym to protect his identity from the police. One of these titles, Bagne de femmes (The Women’s Penal Colony, 1931) was described by the publisher as benefitting from “engravings of incredible realism” by Carlo that enhanced the account of “a rich and authoritarian woman [who] had the audacity to create a veritable prison for women. There, under the rule of fierce guardians, splendid creatures are delivered to horrible and voluptuous suffering.” Carlo’s plates show leather-clad dominatrices binding their submissive victims or enjoying the pleasure of dressing up in elbow length gloves, corsets, stockings and stiletto heels. This sort of content and illustration is pretty typical of the entire genre throughout its interwar heyday.

Carlo’s skill- and what keeps his work collectable nearly one hundred years later- was to be able to devise the most baroque and ingenious torments for the slaves of the dominatrices he drew, combining these with utterly baroque outfits of leather and other materials. It can be surprising to see items that you would anticipate only to find in a modern fetish shop appearing in a fully-equipped 1920s dungeon. A woman has to go round on all fours dressed as a leather dog in Mac Clyde’s Despotisme féminin or as a be-feathered horse pulling a carriage in Servitude. Carlo’s women are always perfect: their perms are glossy, without a hair out of place (despite all that whipping); they wear extreme corsets, elaborate headwear with antennae or rabbit ears, ruffs, masks or hoods, long boots and gloves. His mastery of fabrics and textures, and his ability to depict the light reflected on shiny materials and hair is impressive, especially given the fact that his illustrations were very seldom coloured and were usually only created with pen and ink.

I’ve written a great deal about those artists working at the more literary and respectable end of the business of publishing erotica. Illustrators like Becat and Saint-Andre were able to maintain careers in painting and church mural design whilst still being able to work on erotic texts without it damaging their reputations too much. It helped, of course, that they received commissions to design plates for established figures in the literary canon, Laclos, Ronsard, Baudelaire and the like, or that more contemporary authors were writing poetry and ‘modern classics’ (Apollinaire or Pierre Louys for example). Individuals like Carlo, who provided illustrations for spanking novels, don’t seem to have come from the same kind of background at all. These different groups of artists may have intersected in their willingness to make money designing magazine covers or commercial posters, or drawing comic strips, but virtually none of the named artists I’ve featured seem to have been commissioned by the more clandestine publishing houses nor do any of their habitual illustrators seem to have made the break into more conventional book illustration; the only exception to this is Luc Lafnet, whose career I have outlined. Of course, we know Lafnet’s real name; with the other artists it’s hard to say for sure given the prevalence of disguising identities with jokey pseudonyms. Nevertheless, I wonder if there may have been something of a ‘class’ divide between those who attended an art school like the Ecole des Beaux Arts and those who went to a technical school specifically to learn to draw for commercial purposes- adverts, posters, catalogues and such like.

The preceding speculations don’t detract in the least from Carlo’s draughtsmanship and his unique sense of the exotic and exciting. If you’d like to know more about this enigmatic figure, there are several websites dedicated to or featuring Carlo’s work, as well as a now rather rare and expensive book from 1984 by Robert Merodack that celebrates his skills. His books are still available- either as originals or reprints- through Amazon, Abe and other vendors.

Jean Berque- painter and illustrator

Woman’s portrait 1924

Jean Berque (1896-1954) was a French artist of note, whose work has sadly been somewhat neglected since his death, although he produced paintings and illustrative work from the 1920s until his death in 1954. The art deco style of the period is often evident in his work. He became particularly productive as an illustrator for books, illustrating the works of distinguished writers, including Collette, Pierre Louys, Pierre Ronsard, Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Shelley.

Port of Toulon

Berque was born in Reims in 1896 to a family interested in the arts. With their encouragement, in 1916 he moved to Paris to enrol in the Académie Ranson where he was taught by the notable post-Impressionists Félix Valloton, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier. His enlistment soon afterwards was quite short, as he was discharged from military service in 1917 on health grounds- something that may well have preserved his life and his talent given the vicious trench fighting of the war at this stage.

Market scene in Morocco

In 1922 Berque became a member of The Union of Decorative Arts in Reims. In 1923-24 the unique church of Saint-Nicaise was built in that city by Jacques Marcel Aubertin, having been commissioned to do so by the industrialist, Georges Charbonneaux. This was a period of resurgence in the production of religious art and this church was decorated with a marked Art Deco style. Gustave Jaulmes and Maurice Denis were entrusted with the fine art decorations whilst the jeweller René Lalique created the windows. Amongst other artists involved, Jean Berque produced a Madonna and Child and in 1925, a series of Stations of the Cross (see below). He had already travelled in Italy to be able to study the Renaissance religious art.

In early 1924, Berque contributed to the first group exhibition to be held at the Eugène Druet Gallery in Paris, alongside major names such as Valotton, Sérusier, Aristide Maillol, Henri Labasque, and others. He continued to exhibit regularly, painting figures, still lifes and landscapes (note the Moroccan market scene, an orientalist canvas typical of colonial France in the interwar period- see Paul-Emile Becat and Berthomme Saint-Andre previously). Berque particularly gained a reputation for his nudes- especially when, in 1927, a nude image of his illustrating the cover of the satirical review Crapouillot was banned from the Paris news-stands.

Seated nude

This ban may have served as good publicity for Berque, as he was soon very busy with illustration work, receiving frequent commissions during the 1930s from the publisher Philippe Gonin in Paris and from the Gonin Brothers in Lausanne. Nevertheless, Berque also designed adverts for Perrier and theatrical designs for la Comédie francaise.

Nu de dos

In 1942 Berque illustrated ‘Amours de Marie’ by Ronsard and thereafter continued to work on erotic texts- generally the more literary ones such as The Song of Songs and Collette’s 1923 Le Blé en herbe in 1946, a commission that was of particular note because the author especially liked his illustrations. He was also by no means averse to working for private press erotic publications. Berque’s drawings for the erotic works of Pierre Louys are prominent amongst these, such as the 1945 edition of the novella Trois filles de leur mère which did not shy away from the more controversial aspects of the text: the incidents of bestiality, lesbian incest, sodomy and underage sexuality that still make the book highly controversial today were all explicitly depicted. Berque also worked on Louys’ Douze Douzaine Dialogues in 1943, making it strong lesbian content very apparent. In 1935, Berque worked on an edition of Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis, a version entitled Les Chansons Secrete de Bilitis. His twelve watercolour plates are lively complements to the text, especially the scene of maenads celebrating Dionysos and Astarte/ Aphrodite seen below.

Plate from Bilitis, 1935, illustrating song 94

Berque was very much like other artists I have described here: he had a career in fine art and worked in a variety of styles, from orientalist landscapes and genre scenes to modernist portraits, but he was not adverse to more commercial ventures and felt no apparent discomfort designing highly erotic material as well as being known for his religious works. These may seem to suggest that he would have experienced personal and aesthetic conflicts, but I do not think that we should probably not seek to infer very much about the character of most of these individuals, other than to recognise that- especially during wartime- they needed to take work when it was offered.

For more discussion of subjects covered here, see my book In the Garden of Aphrodite and also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.

from St Nicaise de Chemin Vert, Reins

Image & Imagination in the Work of Pierre Louys

Leda or ‘La Louange des Bienheureuses Tenebres‘ engraving by Paul-Albert Laurens (1898)

In 1862 Gustave Flaubert published his historical epic, Salammbo. His publishers suggested having the book illustrated, given that it featured spectacular scenes of warfare and exotic religion in ancient Carthage, but the author rejected the idea, objecting that it would destroy the imaginative impact of his work. I think we can understand and sympathise with Flaubert as a writer; additionally, much of Salammbo is taken up with almost cinematic descriptions of vast armies fighting- something illustrations could hardly have represented adequately.

Nevertheless, I was fascinated to discover this detail about the book and to contrast it to the attitude of the later author, Pierre Louys, whose Aphrodite was, I would say, strongly influenced by Salammbo. Both books are set in an alien, pagan world, distant in time and space. Both feature thefts from temples, crucifixion of offenders, sacred harlots and an enigmatic central female figure. Despite these broad thematic similarities, Louys’ novel pursued a very different course and, significantly for our purposes here, illustrated editions appeared very soon after its first publication.

Considering this contrast, it struck me that Pierre Louys was, in fact, a very visual writer. He was himself a photographer and an amateur artist and in recent years his erotic photos and drawings of naked women and girls have been published, as Le cul de femme and La femme respectively. His books contain scenes that seem almost intended to form the basis of plates designed by artists: Princess Aline admiring herself before her mirror in Roi Pausole, or, in Aphrodite, the heroine Chrysis carried off as a girl by horsemen or displaying herself to the population of Alexandria in the jewellery she has had stolen for her. For this crime, she is executed with poison, and the artist Demetrios, who became obsessed with her, then sculpts her deceased body as a way of preserving an image of her notable beauty. In the novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three daughters and their mother), the eldest daughter Charlotte is imagined dressed up as a schoolgirl with plaits; in the Twilight of the Nymphs, Louys pictures how the nymph Leda’s body and hair are all different shades of blue. As for most of Louys’ later poetry, it is comprised of short verses (for example the compact four line ‘quatrains’ of Pybrac that each describe a single vignette) which are ideally suited to the artist and have been copiously illustrated as a result.

Carlier, Le Miroir de Chrysis

These verbal images soon became printed ones. Twilight of the Nymphs was published with illustrations by Paul-Albert Laurens in 1898. In that same year, Laurens also illustrated the second edition of Bilitis. Others editions of that book followed in 1895, with watercolours by Robaglia and in 1906, illustrated by Raphael Collin. The first illustrated edition of Aphrodite, with plates by Antoine Calbet, appeared in 1896; another, illustrated by Edward Zier, appeared in 1900 (this is the edition to be found on Gutenburg). In that same year, the sculptor Joseph Carlier exhibited Le Miroir, which represents Chrysis admiring herself in a mirror, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Plainly, Louys must have welcomed the physical depiction of his imagined scenes. Another edition appeared in 1896, reprinted in 1898 and 1910, with plates by Edmond Malassis. As I shall describe elsewhere, Malassis’ plates and headpieces partook very much of the graphic style of their period, but they also exude a charming and saucy energy, taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by the text to make the most of the set-pieces, such as the bacchanalian orgy at the home of the courtesan Bacchis (Book 3, chapters 1-4).

The dancers at Bacchis’ orgy

‘Party got out of bounds….’

We can go further still, I think. Louys often included scenes in his books in which performances are staged for characters- and thereby for the reader. He imagines this play or dance and then enacts it for us as if we are the audience too. These performances involve the characters, but in addition they are something for us to witness as a spectacle and to become deeply engaged by. In Les aventures du Roi Pausole, Princess Aline falls in love with the dancer Mirabelle when she sees her performing on stage. In Bilitis the two young girls, Glottis and Kyse, dance for Bilitis, partly displaying their skill but also as a way of trying to tempt her to choose one as a partner- a moment depicted in a plate by Paul-Emile Becat. In the novella Trois filles de leur mere, the story concludes with the three daughters staging a ‘play’ (with costumes) for the young student they have all seduced. This is very clearly a ‘home theatrical,’ but there are other elements in the story in which the girls and their mother perform for others. The oldest daughter, Charlotte, passed various milestones in her journey to sexual maturity in front of invited audiences, whilst the entire family, as sex workers, in a sense ‘perform’ for their clients in order to give them an illusion of passion and love.

Bilitis illustrated by Becat

Staged scenes therefore seem to have been a key part of the way in which Louys liked to envisage his works. That this is the case is demonstrated, as I described before, by the fact that he collaborated or agreed to several works being turned into various musical dramas, operas and plays. Fascinatingly, a very early (and brief) erotic film, Le Rêveil de Chrysis (1899), seems to have been based upon the opening chapter of Aphrodite. Much more recently, La femme et la pantin became a film, firstly in 1935 as The Devil Is a Woman, directed and photographed by Josef von Sternberg, starring Marlene Dietrich, and then in 1977 as That Obscure Object of Desire directed by Luis Buñuel. Aphrodite in 1982 was filmed by Robert Fuest and, very much more loosely, David Hamilton adapted Les Chansons de Bilitis into the 1977 film Bilitis.

Because Louys’ books were so frequently illustrated, especially in the quarter century period from his death until about 1950, it is now hard to hard to conceive them separately from those images- rather as is the case with John Tenniel’s illustrations of the Alice stories. Those book pates can stand apart as separate artworks (and, as I have described, there is a thriving market for them as such) but they also bring vitality and vividness to the texts themselves. Often, they shed new perspectives on the books. For example, whilst Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre‘s watercolours for Trois filles de leur mere are quite delicate and make the sex scenes appear almost loke genteel parties in suburban living rooms, Georges Pichard‘s cartoon style artwork, with its strong contrasts between black and white and bold delineation, brings out far more starkly and memorably the bleaker, more depraved aspects of the book. This is a key aspect of illustration: encapsulating literary ideas in visual form, can mean that they are far less mediated or disguised. As such, they may reveal the psyche of an age more directly, crystallising or laying bare attitudes and appetites which were generally hidden.

The best book plates not only complement but enhance and amplify the text that they accompany. The result is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a single, unified work of art, and I would argue that many of the illustrated Louys volumes should be regarded as such (as, once again, the auction prices paid for them by collectors might well attest). It’s arguable, as well, that the publication record of the works of Pierre Louys stand testimony to the fact that word and image can work so well together: there have been at least forty illustrated editions of the poet and author’s works over the last 130 years.

For more detail on the illustrators of Louys, see my books page.

Chrysis displays herself to the citizens of Alexandria in Zier’s illustration to Aphrodite

Paul-Emile Bécat- painter and illustrator

An illustration for Les Chansons de Bilitis- Bilitis and the nymphs

Paul-Émile Bécat (1885-1960) was a French portrait and landscape painter, printmaker, engraver and illustrator. He studied fine art in Paris at the l’École de Beaux-Arts and first exhibited at the prestigious Salon de Paris in 1913. He was recognised as an accomplished painter, being well known for his portraits of French writers, he exhibited widely and won several awards.

Bécat, Paysage Afrique (Congo River) 1933

Bécat was an active member of the Société Coloniale des Artistes Français (Colonial Society of French Artists) and made several trips to Africa during the 1920s and 30s. This led to extensive travels in the Congo, Gabon, and the Sudan and a life-long interest in Africa and its culture. The painter was, therefore, an orientalist in this aspect of his work.

A plate from Pierre Louys Les Aventures du Roi Pausole

Despite his wide artistic interests, Bécat is probably best remembered for his illustrative work. As I have described before, the 1930s were a boom time for French publishers of illustrated books and, like many other accomplished painters of the period (such as Suzanne Ballivet, Clara Tice, Berthomme Saint-Andre, Mariette Lydis, or Louis Icart), he realised there were lucrative commissions to be found in this field. From 1933, Bécat began to specialise in dry-point etching to create plates for erotic works. He became a prolific illustrator of erotica (both prose and verse) although his output even included a deck of female nude playing cards in a portfolio titled L’art d’aimer (The Art of Love).

An illustration from Casanova’s ‘My love affairs in Venice’

Bécat’s illustrative work for erotic books included almost all the major works by Pierre Louÿs: these are editions of Aphrodite (1937), L’Histoire de Roi Gonzalve (1935), Bilitis (1943), La Femme et le pantin (1945) and Roi Pausole (1947). Other titles he illustrated include Lafontaine’s Contes (Tales) 1928, Colette (1936), Trente-deux poèmes d’amour (1937), Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1944), Poèmes d’amour (1946) Brantôme’s Vie des dames galantes (1948), Prélude charnel (1948), Les Liaisons dangereuses by Laclos (1949), La vie des seins (1955), Paul Verlaine’s Les amies (a short collection of poems about lesbian lovers), Poemes d’amour (1946), Oeuvres Libres (1948) and Fetes Galantes (1953), An Up to Date Young Lady by Helen Varley (1920s) and a 1935 edition of Fanny Hill. There were many others: by the end of the 1950s he had illustrated over ninety books, including all the standard erotic and mildly-erotic titles of the period. This productivity may be ascribed to the fact that, unlike some illustrators, Bécat could work quickly and reliably and was accordingly favoured by publishers.

Despite so much of his work involving nudity and sex, Bécat maintained a quite innocent, colourful style, although some of his black and white etchings are almost photographic in their detail and finish- for example, Les oraisons amoureuses (1957), Fortunio (1956) and Casanova’s Mes amours à Venise (1954). Bécat’s illustrations are, generally, rather genteel and charming; they are seldom explicit, although the plates for Roi Gonzalve are an exception to this statement, perhaps because the content of the text itself allows scope for little else.

For mor eon Pierre Louys see my bibliography for the author; for more on Bécat and other illustrators of the writer’s work, see my books page.

From Louys’ Aphrodite, the death of Chrysis

Comedy and Parody in the work of Pierre Louys

One strange aspect of the work of Belgian-French author Pierre Louys was his tendency to indulge in parody. He parodied major French writers, such as Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, but he also- more surprisingly- continually parodied himself.

One of Louys’ first works was a translation of the Roman poet Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans (1892), a text which indicates Louys’ constant interest in erotic matters, as well as his skills as a classical scholar. He later parodied this work in his Douze Douzains de Dialogues (or Twelve Dozen Dialogues), a collection of outrageously exaggerated exchanges between lovers based around various perversions and fetishes.

Louys’ major novel, Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1901), imagined a pagan kingdom in south-west France which constituted a kind of social and moral utopia for the author. Louys subsequently savagely parodied his own ideals in another novel (which was never finished), L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (The History of King Gonzalve and the twelve princesses), an account that starts in fairy tale form with ‘Once upon a time’ and rapidly descends into a wicked distortion of everything he had held up as admirable in Roi Pausole. His L’Ile aux dames (The Island of Women) is a parody partly of Pausole but mainly of Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island. The island invented by Louys is another utopia, a version of the classical world of sexual diversity and equality found in Bilitis and Aphrodite but brought into the modern world- and (naturally) taken to excess.

I have written before about his poetry collection, Pybrac. Its non-serious and mocking nature is once again revealed when you appreciate that the title is derived from sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralising quatrains were common reading for French youngsters until the nineteenth century. Louys attacked the prim worthiness of du Faur by savagely inverting everything he stood for: each of the three hundred plus quatrains in the book start with “I don’t like to see,” followed by a description of some over the top sexual scene. On the face of it, he plays the Puritan condemning impurity, lust and vice, but in his detailed pictures of what it is that he doesn’t like, Louys of course achieves the opposite effect- he conjures it explicitly for the reader and leads us to suspect that he actually is rather obsessed with and excited by what he purports to condemn.

Lastly, Louys wrote La femme et le pantin (Woman and Puppet) in 1898- in itself, it was a parody of Prosper Merimee’s Carmen. He then parodied La femme et le pantin‘s theme of a calculating woman manipulating and exploiting a man in his later novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of their Mother). This- like Roi Gonzalve– goes to extremes, tasting the boundaries of taste with its utterly over the top scenarios and outrageous exaggeration. I would also argue that Trois filles is a parody of the work of the Marquis de Sade, the great French innovator in over-the-top pornographic fantasy. De Sade is already so extreme in his fevered orgies and (of course) sadism that the only route to mockery is through hyperbole. Louys achieved this, at the same time reversing the male exploitation of women seen in One Hundred Days of Sodom and simultaneously ridiculing the helpless innocence displayed by the heroine in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). By so doing, he exposed the the chauvinism and misogyny that runs through de Sade’s work.

As several academic authorities have underlined, Trois filles is not to be mistaken for mere coarse pornography, though. As in all his works, Louys works into his text literary references, so that we understand that he is consciously parodying and deforming existing authors and genres. In Trois filles, for example, he cites Roman writers, Renaissance French poets and the theologian Erasmus- as well as contemporary writers. John Phillips, a scholar of French literature, has described how Louys made an important contribution to the inventiveness of French erotic literature, making creating something that was obscene and yet, as a result of his humour, unerotic. He exaggerated the conventions of the genre until they were extreme- and, as a result, unreal and even ridiculous. Phillips put it rather neatly: whereas porn aims for physical pleasure, Louys sought “textual pleasure,” through excess achieving a skilful manipulation of a literary form (Forbidden Fictions, 1999, c.3).

It has been common for the artists illustrating Louys’ works to mirror visually his writing style. Just as the text is exaggerated to the point of preposterousness, so the book plates can be extravagant and excessive to the point of caricature. Some illustrators have gone for artistic and elegant images (for example, Georges Barbier’s art nouveau colour plates in the 1922 edition of Chansons de Bilitis), but others, notably Edouard Chimot and Georges Pichard, in illustrating editions of Trois filles in 1950 and 1983 respectively, went for a style verging on the cartoonish.

This was especially true of Pichard (1920-2002), who illustrated a series of graphic books from the mid-1950s onwards. Born in Paris, he was educated at the École des Arts Appliques, and after World War II worked as illustrator in advertising before publishing his first cartoon strip in La Semaine de Suzette in 1956, featuring a ‘girl next-door’ character called Miss Mimi.

In the early ’60s, Pichard met screenwriter Jacques Lob, with whom he collaborated on two superhero parodies, Ténébrax and Submerman. After a few years, though, Pichard left the family-friendly comics entirely, so that by the late 1960s, his work was increasingly testing moral boundaries, with (as Wikipedia puts it) a “style of shaping his female heroines into tall, well-endowed women with excessive eyeliner make-up to create a gothic appearance.” Having collaborated with Danie Dubos on the more daring ‘Lolly-strip’ which was serialised in Le Rire in 1966, Pichard and Lob began work within the adult genre of comics with the strip ‘Blanche Épiphanie’ in V Magazine in 1968. This marked a distinct change in Pichard’s style: the heroine Blanche is a pure orphan (rather like de Sade’s Justine), as naive as she is physically desirable, who finds herself the target of men’s lust and inevitably finds herself stripped naked and stunned. Blanche Epiphanie caused a scandal when it was published in France-Soir . Thereafter Pichard continued to push moral boundaries when he collaborated with Georges Wolinski to create a yet more controversial series featuring the eponymous character ‘Paulette,’ which began serial publication in Charlie Mensuel in 1970. Le Monde has described how the artist “became an undisputed master of adult comics with his buxom, falsely naive heroines, who are always forced into risqué situations.”

Pichard’s early work from the late 1940s and ‘50s featured busty young women, but his draughtsmanship was simple, even cartoonish.  By the time of his version of Ulysses in 1968, his characteristic strong lines and the dark, full-lipped, heavy-lidded and large breasted female figure has emerged and is well established by Caroline (1975), along with elements of bondage, sexual torture and various other perverse practices.  The influence of US cartoonist Robert Crumb is plain in the development of Pichard’s work; the American stressed that he drew comix- that is, X-rated comics- and the French artist’s mature style is definitively situated in this genre whilst his women, both in their physique and their strong personas, bear a close resemblance to those drawn by Crumb.

In 1977 Pichard’s book Marie-Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope, with its explicit focus on BDSM and strange tortures (reminiscent of the gothic fantasies of Carlo), led to many popular bookshops ceasing to stock his work. Nonetheless, having become something of a specialist in erotic art, into the 1980s Pichard continued to illustrate free adaptions of classic erotic stories such as Sader-Masoch’s ‘Red Countess’ (1985), ‘The Lotus Flower’ by Jin Ping Mei (1987), Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire (1991), The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana (1991), La Religieuse by Denis Diderot (1992), Germinal by Émile Zola (1992), Prosper Merimee’s Carmen (1995) and, of course, Trois filles. His Marie-Gabrielle in the Orient is modern Orientalist exploitation.

The artist’s version of the Odyssey, transformed “the bewitching Circe into a super-sexy vamp,” according to Le Monde. Summarising his career, the paper’s obituary said that “Drawing women with generous shapes with a pen, highlighted by black and white enhanced by screens, Georges Pichard wanted to be the heir of the libertines of the Age of Enlightenment. Dandy, dressed to the nines, convinced feminist, he was one of the precursors of eroticism in comics and one of the main French counter-culture cartoonists of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Pichard’s illustrations are rendered in black and white in a cartoonish manner, often highly stylised and unrealistic. The men are often either ruggedly handsome or aged and grotesque. The women have exaggerated breasts and nipples, full lips, abundant lashes and freckles and very dark eyes. This kind of cartoon approach to Louys plainly makes sense to some publishers, hence the edition of Roi Gonzalve which appeared in 1990, illustrated by Dutch graphic artist Kris de Roover. His pictures are bright, bold and colourful in comic book manner. The virtue of these pairings of caricature-like images with the French author’s texts is to remind us that what Louys wrote was frequently not to be taken seriously: he was burlesquing and sending up books that he often regarded as pompous and boring- or he was simply lampooning himself for the fun of it. Accordingly, Pichard’s series of illustrations for Louys Trois filles de leur mere (1983) are very consciously drawn with stark, strong lines in a highly explicit style that confronts the graphic nature of the book head on: Pichard’s reading of the text seems to been to find it grotesque and pitiable- hence the almost haunted look he gave to some of the characters. In this respect, it’s interesting to contrast his artistic response to that of Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre, whose light, lyrical lines and watercolour washes tend towards a happier, more homely sense of the family, or Edouard Chimot‘s lively and brightly coloured illustrations, which help to emphasise the excitement and pleasure of the family Louys described. These radically contrasted illustrative strategies underline my argument that the contribution of the artist to illustrated books can have a major impact upon the reader’s interaction with the text itself.

Pichard’s later style and subject matter must unavoidably have been shaped by the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the ‘permissive’ society, bringing with it a greater tolerance not just of sex, but of varied sexualities, must have given him the confidence to explore what was graphically acceptable with publishers and the buying public. He came to work on Trois Filles de leur mère at the end of this more liberal and radical era, but his response to the text sits clearly within its values. Louys may have written the book six decades earlier, but the issues he portrayed had become elements of serious contemporary debate and Pichard must hve approached it in full knowledge of what it symbolised.

Pichard’s personal reaction to Trois filles was, I believe, to consider it to be a disturbing account of family abuse and filial enslavement, combined with a depiction of the brutalising effects of prostitution; this seems to have been adopted from the student narrator of the story, who expresses shock and revulsion at various points in the other characters’ narratives. Pichard’s illustrations were, accordingly, shaped by his understanding of Louys’ message. The artist’s illustrations are stark and monochrome, a choice that emphasises the harshness of their reading of the narrative. The romanticising- even cheerful- element that Chimot’s artwork introduced, is entirely absent. This is compounded by the fact that Pichard treated the text in the manner of a comic strip, with multiple plates, rather than the five to ten that might be more usual. This multiplicity of images only serves to hammer home the grimness and strained helplessness of the story he portrayed.

For more information, see my bibliography for Pierre Louys.