‘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

Translation, Interpretation & Illustration- Ways of Seeing Art & Literature

Maurice Julhès’ illustration of the song ‘Uncertainty’ from Chansons de Bilitis Part II

Here, I’m going to test out an argument that the illustration of works of literature may be regarded as a form of translation- from one medium of communication to another. I’d like to propose that, whether the passage is from one language to another, or from the word on the page to the line, the same considerations and difficulties can apply.

Translation is by no means the neutral process that we might suppose it to be. We can all achieve instant AI translations now, at the click of the mouse, but we would be mistaken in accepting these too readily. This may change as AI becomes more intelligent, but- at present- it reflects the choices made by the individuals who created the tools- the very same process of selection made by human translators working directly from a text- but perhaps neither so intelligently or expertly in the case of AI. 

I have written a lot about the work of the Belgian born and French speaking novelist and poet Pierre Louys (1870-1925) and (as I mention on another page) I have had cause in my research to translate several works by him that are currently not available in convenient English editions. Now, I’ll admit, I generally run these through an online translation tool to begin with; it’s quick and it almost instantly gives you a basic text to work with. But what you get always needs tidying up. As we know, words can have several meanings and it is not unusual for online translators to choose the commonest- or perhaps the standard- definition, something that can reduce a sentence to nonsense. To restore what I consider to be the correct sense, of course, I’ve got to make another subjective selection. Slang is often poorly handled by translation tools- especially if it’s from a century ago. Then there are fundamental linguistic differences that have to be resolved: French, for example, often uses the present tense to discuss past events, something which sounds odd in English. Grammar and style have to be sorted out to make a passage easily readable and, all the time, there is an almost unconscious input from the person doing the transcription- preferred ways of saying things; words you’d rather not use (at all or in certain contexts)- a whole constellation of taste and prejudice which can get involved. Then, of course, there’s the question of verse. Do you aim to preserve the meaning, and produce blank verse, or do you try to reproduce something of the metre and rhyme pattern too, which can force you into quite major divergences from the literal sense of the text? This is especially an issue with Pierre Louys, who took a delight in matching the verse forms of classical literature with very rude content. Part of the parody is the contradiction between the sonnet form and the smut. Which do you choose?

In short, a translated work can only be the author’s words filtered through a third party’s well-intentioned, principled and carefully considered prejudices and selections. Perhaps, then, this is an argument for saying that illustrations are a more neutral form of translation, as the illustrator only has to represent what he or she has read. However, as I’ve pointed out several times before, selection and taste always intervene. The artist has to decide: which character(s) or which moment to depict; the manner of that depiction; the general artistic style employed (to choose extremes- a ‘photo-real’ illustration, or something very free and impressionistic?) Once again, all sorts of issues of taste and choice intervene- probably further shaped by a publisher’s editorial policies, house style, target market and so on. Illustration is no less neutral than verbal translation.

So, I turn again to various translations of Pierre Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis, and to wonder whether the 1945 edition illustrated by Maurice Julhès (1896-1986) was one of the most effective combinations of words and image in the long history of publication of this work.

Julhès was born in Sannois, in the Oise valley, and trained in the decorative arts before becoming an illustrator for humorous newspapers after 1918. During World War II, Julhès worked for several magazines that were under German supervision and, as a result, after the Liberation, he was suspended from his work for two years. However, in 1947 he returned to illustrating comic strips and children’s books. Despite his primarily satirical and mocking output, he was commissioned to illustrate adult works such as the Poésies of Sappho or the Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire- as well as his work on Bilitis. Coming to the work as a cartoonist on this text, Julhès took care to reflect the Greek setting and brought his skills in capturing vivid and concise imagery, as well as the ability to weave the text around the pictures in a dynamic way. 

Julhès: pages from Parts II & III of Les Chansons de Bilitis

In 1999, I might add, a graphic novel version of Aphrodite by Pierre Louys also appeared. The three parts of the book were published as separate volumes with different illustrators; Milo Manara illustrated Book 1, Georges Bess worked on Part 2 and Claire Wendling on Part 3. The books feature lavish full-page colour plates. Other contemporary graphic novel style approaches to the novels of Louys have been mentioned before: Georges Pichard‘s work on the novella Trois filles de leur mere in 1980 and Kris de Roover‘s illustration of the unfinished L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve in 1990. All these editions (as well as the older ones) will be found to be readily available through Abe Books and Amazon.

My last examples purport to be translations but are actually pornographic pirates of Les Chansons. In 1930 Les Veritables Chansons de Bilitis appeared, a work (probably) of Pascal Pia (1903-79). Born Pierre Durand, he was a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar; he used a number of pseudonyms, including Pascal Rose, Pascal Fely and others. In 1922 Pia published the erotic work Les Princesses de Cythère (Cythera being the island of Aphrodite) and followed this up in 1928 with La Muse en rut (The Muse in Heat), a collection of erotic poems. His ‘pastiche’ of Bilitis fits within this genre of writing and perhaps reflects his sense of humour (often expressed in absurdist tendencies). 

Two illustrated versions of Les Veritables Chansons followed, the first with plates by Lucien Metivet (1863-1932) a poster artist, cartoonist, illustrator and author. The text purports to be a new translation of a Justinian manuscript. If this refers to the Roman emperor Justinian (482-565 CE) we are looking at a time period some 900 years after the purported dates of the ‘original’ Bilitis in the book by Louys. The new version is in prose, not verse, and takes various incidents from the original by Louys and expands upon them in detail, going far beyond what the Songs either say or imagine. Hence we have, for instance, a detailed description of Bilitis and Glottis having sex together and a later episode in which Bilitis and Mnasidika decide to enter into a menage a trois with an innocent girl called Galatee. My guess is that this name was borrowed from a character Louys’ Aventures du Roi Pausole, which Metivet coincidentally had also illustrated in 1906. Metivet’s illustrations are in his trade mark red and black ink and reflect the explicit contents of the new version of the story.

The Metivet version

A further edition of the Veritables Chansons appeared in 1946, illustrated by Jean Jouy. This was a further pirating of the original, in the sense that the prose passages from the 1937 version were rendered into verse and matched with large colour plates. The book has moved a long way from what Louys wrote, as there is a large heterosexual element, as well as mixed orgies, both in the text and the images. Jouy’s plates are very attractive, but highly explicit. There is also an undated edition entitled Les Chansons Secrets de Bilitis with illustrations by an unknown artist which are very similar in form and content to Jouy’s.

These last two examples are not ‘translations’ as such, but they illustrate how editors and writers adapting the texts of others can depart from the originals they’re working to create almost wholly new books. To return to my thesis at the start, I think it’s not uncommon for readers to take illustrations in books rather for granted but, when done well and thoughtfully, they can be as much part of the visual and intellectual experience as the text itself.