“Wonderful things”- Some rare illustrated books in the British Library

Clara Tice, King Pausole, Princess Aline & Giglio at the Fountain of the Nymphs (Book 4, Epilogue)

I recently made a sort of pilgrimage to the British Library to look at some of their illustrated editions of the books of Pierre Louys; a confession- I’ve written a lot about these but I’ve substantially relied on images found online- other than for the 1932 Collected Works published by the Pierre Louys Society of America. I wanted to experience some of these books in my hands because, as regular readers will know, I have put considerable stress on the significance of the bibiology of Louys- the astonishing number of illustrated editions of his works that people have felt it worthwhile producing. The experience of the book as a physical, tactile object can be every bit bit as valuable as reading the text, in addition to which I wanted to see the various colour plates as they had been designed to be seen- on the page and at the size that the artist had intended. This was the visit I looked at the very rare poem Maddalou as well.

I’ll start with the most outrageous- the 1933 edition of L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve s et les douze princesses. It was tiny- just 10 by 7.5 cms; perhaps this was to enable something potentially illicit to be smuggled more easily; certainly, the book pretends to have been published in Madrid, which was probably intended to throw the authorities off the scent. This edition (which only totalled 205 copies) is illustrated with a dozen pen and ink drawings by Auguste Brouet. The unfinished story concerns King Gonzalve’s incest with his twelve daughters and Brouet faithfully reproduced these incidents in explicit detail. That said, the pictures were very small indeed, which must rather have detracted from their impact.

Next, a couple of real treasures. I looked first at the 1898 edition of Louys’ version of Leda, generally found now as part of the collection Crepuscule des nymphes (Twilight of the Nymphs in the 1926 Collected Works). As I’ve described before, this original version is illustrated with plates by Paul-Albert Laurens. It is a truly beautiful book, to hold and to look at. It’s printed on thick verge d’Arches paper and the illuminated initial letters and tailpiece illustrations are handpainted in watercolour. In places, I could see where the paint had strayed over the printed outlines and, in one case, over the frame of one of the decorative capital letters. Only 600 copies were printed, of which this was number 183- it was gorgeous, a little jewel.

Clara Tice, King Pausole, Mirabelle & Aline at the inn (Book 2, c.8)

Nearly as lovely was the 1926 edition (for the Pierre Louys Society) of The Adventures of King Pausole, illustrated by Clara Tice. This was copy 586 of 990. The book itself, like my copy of the 1932 Collected Works, was decent but not top quality; the text was the same translation in each. The pages are moderately heavy paper, typical of middle of the range books of the time, but what lifts this edition is the plates- ten of them- by Tice. These are little jewels, printed in bright pinks and greens but, in some cases, with radiant backgrounds of silver or gold. The figures are, predominantly, Tice’s sweet female nudes; her drawing is dynamic and the designs are elegant. It was a joy to turn the pages. There’s a delightful humour in Tice’s work- from the odd phallic sceptre carried by the king to her young females, who always look slightly startled, their mouths in a cute moue.

Clara Tice, King Pausole, Queen Philis arrives in the capital (Book 4, c.5)

Collot, courtesans of the temple of Aphrodite

Next I looked at the 1946 edition of Aphrodite, illustrated by Andre Collot and published by Henri Kaeser in Lausanne. The plates were printed on heavier paper than the text; a total of one thousand copies were printed and this seemed to be reflected in the fact that it felt less special and expensive than the books I’d already inspected. From 1930, I also inspected a copy of Douze douzains de dialogues illustrated by Collot. Although it lacked any bibliographical information from the publisher, the pages were thick, heavy paper, untrimmed (and unnumbered) and there were attractive floral pattern endpapers. The text was reproduced as if it was handwriting and the plates were minimalist pen and ink sketches, but it was notable how well the artist had captured the various facial expressions of the protagonists.

All the same, the next volume, Les Chansons de Bilitis, illustrated by Mariette Lydis in 1934, was number 1550 copies out of a total print-run of 5000- yet it felt more precious than the 1946 Aphrodite. Perhaps this was because it was printed on velin chiffon paper rather than plain old velin blanc– although the marbled endpapers may have helped? Maybe it was just because I esteem Ms Lydis more highly as an artist. She was generous- thirty four images, mainly included as tailpieces to the individual songs. In the copy I saw, these were printed just in black and white, but I have seen online coloured versions which have some differences in the drawing too. As ever with Mariette Lydis, these were delicate and tender evocations of female beauty and women in love.

Lydis, Bilitis, song 76, ‘Evening by the fire’

Also illustrated by Lydis in the same Union Latine d’Editions series was a copy of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole. It was in the same format as Bilitis, with attractive marbled end papers and quality, heavier paper for the illustrations. There was a title page image of a young woman’s head, and eleven ‘tipped in’ plates on separate sheets bound into the text. These were in Lydis’ typical soft pencil drawing style; interestingly, one plate- showing Aline at theatre, catching sight of Mirabelle for the first time- was coloured; the only one on the book. As ever, Lydis produced beautifully modelled female nudes and delicate, expressive pictures of girls in love.

Mariette Lydis, Aline at the theatre, 1934

The rest of the books I examined were from the later 1940s. In 1947 Edition du Grand-Chenes produced an edition of Bilitis illustrated with nine lithographs by Andre Dignimont. One thousand were printed, on velin blanc; the paper was very white and smooth, not as rich feeling as some, but enhanced by red section headings at the top of each page and red page numbers at the foot, plus the drop capital letter at the start of each chapter was printed in red. The book included an introduction on the life and work of Louys written by his friend, Claude Farrère, and the plates reproduced delicate soft pencil drawings with colour shading, all pleasingly simple and attractive.

Dignimont, Bilitis, Book 2, song 76- ‘Soir pres du feu’ (contrast to the Lydis’ plate above)

From the previous year was a curiosity, a version of Pybrac with plates by an unknown artist. It was clearly a reasonably expensive printing, as there were three different qualities of edition: one on papier d’arches that also included a ‘suite’ of the illustrations, provided in a separate folder on unbound sheets and printed on Holland van Gelder Zonen paper (this Dutch firm handmade paper from 1685 to 1982), plus two extra original designs that the editors had decided not to include in the final volume; eight copies of the book were supplied with a single extra original design and a ‘suite’ printed on velin de Renages paper (Renages is a town near Grenoble); lastly, there was the ‘basic’ printing which ran to 42 copies. The eight illustrations were the mystery- again, they spoke of quality, in that they each had a tissue paper cover. The plates were painted, perhaps in gouache, in bright colours, the scenes depicted being very explicit but (technically) rather crude. Some of these scenes also did not reflect any of the quatrains in the collection that I can can identify. The hairstyles and clothes were certainly right for the mid-’40s, but I wonder if at least some of these images were recycled from elsewhere, as if the artist, whoever he was, just decided to paint something rude that was vaguely inspired by the text- which would be odd (then again, there are those two rejected plates). An alternative explanation may be that this selection of 140 quatrains does not draw solely upon the ‘canonical’ collection of three hundred four-line verses. Louys wrote many more than those that are typically included in the available volumes (for example, the translations by Wakefield Press or Black Scat). However, it would have been difficulty to establish this with certainty from the British Library copy as a number of pages were missing. Finally, this edition appears to be so rare I can find no examples of it online- hardly surprising given that there were only ever 51 copies.

The cover of the Serres edition, 1948

From 1948, I inspected a copy of the edition of the Manuel de civilite illustrated by Raoul Serres and ostensibly published in London. Once again, this was a ‘fine art’ edition with several levels of quality. There was just one single copy printed on luxury Vieux Japon paper with six original watercolours, six original designs by the artist and a ‘suite.’ Six were printed on handmade Auvergne paper with the watercolours and the suite; another six were on Auvergne and also included an original design as well as the suite; fifteen were on Auvergne with only the suite added and all the rest were on the velin rives paper (with a very clear watermark) but without any extras. All copies except the top quality version were initialled by the artist. Serres’ twelve watercolours are rude but very funny. The young females have little dot eyes (rather like figures by Clara Tice) and regularly sport a coloured ribbon or bow in their straw yellow hair. The older men they encounter are made to seem more ghastly and unappealing by giving them pale blue skin.

I’ve kept the (second) best for last: Suzanne Ballivet‘s 1948 edition of Roi Pausole, printed in Monte Carlo by Editions du Livre. Three levels of quality were offered: eight copies on Old Japan; forty on pur fil Johannot, a heavy paper made from 100% linen, and the remaining 925 on Grand Velin Renage (which was clearly watermarked Renage). It was a big, heavy book (29 x 23 cms) and, even though the British Library version (as always) was from the least expensive of the sets, it still felt sumptuous. It came in a hard case with card covers and a heavy paper dustjacket. There was a separate ‘suite’ of twelve of the illustrations. The book itself was illustrated by 37 lithographs incorporated into the text plus another twenty ‘tipped-in’ full page plates. Ballivet’s fine pencil illustrations were gorgeous- especially the detail of the woods and meadows in which she placed her figures, with flowers and blades of grass individually delineated. The quantity of illustrations meant there was an image every seven to ten pages, making the book feel very special indeed.

Ballivet, Mirabelle dressing

To conclude, the feel of a book- its size, the quality of the paper, the number and nature of the illustrations- all contribute to the reader’s sense that they are looking at something precious and significant. As for the plates themselves, there was unquestionably something special about seeing the luminosity of Clara Tice’s pastel colours, and the sheen of her silver and gold background, or Laurens’ jewel-like watercolours in Leda.

I wrote recently about the legacy and importance of the work of Pierre Louys: that surely can be appreciated when you handle lavish and expensive books like these and realise how much money, effort and respect publishers, artists and purchasers have been prepared to continue to put into his writings since his death a century ago. These books were unquestionably created as investments: their limited print runs and range of ‘extras’ all confirm that they were planned as highly collectible from the outset, a tribute to the high regard in which their author was held.

For more on the work of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography page. For more on my own writing on the author, see my books page with its links to my Academia page where a range of essays on Louys and his illustrators are posted.

Illustrators, artists and the Parisian book trade

Mermaid, 1921, Cheri Herouard

The poems and novels of Pierre Louys were always destined for publication in illustrated editions.  The writer himself was a decent draughtsman and photographer, whose images of his lovers were clear complements to his verse.  His authorial imagination was such that he conceived of his works as a succession of ‘scenes,’ whether those might be imagined as theatrical or pictorial. What’s more, from the outset, his published work was quickly reissued in illustrated volumes, as commercial publishers appreciated how ideally suited they were to such editions.  The text offered episodes readily translatable to visual form whilst the erotic content had an instant appeal to buyers.  As I’ve argued before, the illustrated editions of Pierre Louys’ various books constitute a major literary corpus that also has considerable art historical significance: sixteen different works were illustrated by in excess of one hundred and thirty different artists and were issued in a total of over one hundred different editions. 

The foregoing figures are impressive, but in concentrating upon them the danger is that the wider context within which such remarkable productivity was possible is taken for granted.  We risk making the mistake of simply accepting that the publishers, artists- and market- were all available, but in reality a major contributing factor to the sheer wealth of artistic creativity that enhanced the writer’s own literary originality lies in the special circumstances of the book trade and visual arts in Paris during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

Publishing & censorship

Perhaps the foremost facilitating factor was the relatively relaxed attitude of the French authorities towards the erotic book trade.  Explicit depictions of sexual activity tended to be risky- which is not to say that out and out porn was not produced (but it was frequently undertaken covertly), nor that depictions of sexual contact were avoided where they could be defended as being ‘artistically justified.’  Editions of several of the more explicit works by literary authors included explicit plates- such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s Onze Milles Vierges (1942) and an edition of Paul Verlaine’s pansexual Oeuvres libres published by Jean Fort in Paris but which claimed to originate “À Eleuthéropolis” (near Hebron in Palestine).  This attribution was a blatant attempt to pretend that the book was nothing to do with a French publishing house- one which was plainly still hedging its bets.

Many of the most explicitly erotic works of Pierre Louys were published following his death in 1925, and were accompanied by suitably graphic illustrations.  Once again, these texts commonly alleged that they had been published outside France.  For example, the 1929 edition of Bilitis apparently came from the Greek island Mytilene, where the heroine of the story lived, and the 1940 edition of Douze douzains de dialogues originated “A Cythère” (at Cythera, one of Aphrodite’s islands).  The 1935 edition of the verse collection, Poésies Érotiques, claimed it came from Chihuahua, Mexico; the 1934 edition of Trois filles de leur mère alleged that it came from Martinique.  These foreign publishers all sound highly improbable, and it’s surely likely that the authorities had a pretty good idea that they had really been produced in Paris. These stratagems aside, the book trade thrived for the first five decades of the twentieth century and, in its turn, encouraged a rich aesthetic community to complement it.

Paris- city of culture

Paris had been a centre of artistic excellence for several hundred years.  In the recent past, of course, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism and other movements had been particularly linked with the city and, as a result, it had become a magnet for artists nationally and internationally, drawn by its schools, ateliers, salons, dealers and galleries. 

A good example of the city’s draw for, and impact upon, painters may be the Bulgarian-born Jules Pascin (1885-1930).  After studying and working in Vienna and Munich, he moved to Paris in 1905 and became immediately involved with the bohemian artistic and literary circles of Montparnasse, where he got to know painters and writers including Hemingway and Picasso.  He enrolled at the academy run by Matisse and, on that painter’s recommendation, regularly visited the Louvre, where he copied the works of such eighteenth-century masters Greuze, Boucher, Van Loo, Watteau and Fragonard.  Pascin’s own taste for erotica and nudes was doubtless reinforced by seeing these earlier painters’ canvases.  Whilst Pascin was never commissioned to work on a book by Louys, he did produce a painting based upon Roi Pausole and, in the tight knit artistic community of the French capital, he knew illustrators such as Andre Dignimont and Marcel Vertès.

The artistic community of Paris was close-knit and somewhat incestuous and doubtless artists passed around news of possible commissions to illustrate books when they were drinking in Montmartre bars. The artistic capital of the world fostered talent in other ways, too: Auguste Brouet, who illustrated Louys’ Roi Gonzalve in 1933, earned money early in his career by producing cheap reproductions of paintings by other, much better-known artists- another good way of honing one’s skills and the instinct for what makes a good composition.

Magazines

A great deal of explicit material (written and visual) was tolerated by the French authorities and plainly contributed to a European perception that Paris was a uniquely ‘naughty’ place.  Such an impression of ‘sauciness’ was doubtless further bolstered by the large number of magazines, such as La Vie Parisienne and Fantasio, in which suggestive images of glamorous nudes habitually appeared.  The artist Chéri Hérouard is very typical of this genre.  A good example of his output is a cartoon of a mermaid that appeared in Fantasio in 1921.  The mermaid is seated, naked of course, on the sea floor, looking up at the bottom half of a woman in a bathing costume swimming above her.  The image surely has a double entendre: the sea creature marvels amusingly at the strange behaviour of terrestrial beings, but at the same time we may enjoy the frisson of wondering if she is tempted by the shapely thighs and lower torso passing within touching distance.  Topless or thinly veiled mermaids and nymphs regularly graced Herouard’s work, as did young beauties bound, or being either spanked or whipped, which were also popular with the artist. See too my post on the work of Georges Redon.

The importance of these magazines is not just what they tell us about the generally permissive mood in Paris, but also what they demonstrate about the artistic community working there.  There was very evidently a pool of graphic artists with considerable skills in draughtsmanship and effective composition, upon whom the journal publishers could draw for cartoons, satirical sketches and other illustrations.  Artists who worked on comic books or drew cartoons for newspapers and magazines included Jacques Touchet and Georges Beuville (both of whom worked on editions of Louys’ Roi Pausole), whilst Maurice Julhès, Pierre Lissac, André-Edouard Marty, Lucien Metivet and Maurice Leroy all illustrated Bilitis as well as drawing humorous sketches. 

Georges Pichard, cartoon, 1950s

Graphic Novels

More recently, as I have described before, graphic novelists have been commissioned to work on Louys’ texts: Georges Pichard used his stark monochrome style to bring out the bleak depravity of Trois Filles in 1980 and Kris de Roover leavened the incest of Roi Gonzalve by means of bright colour blocks in 1990. Both these artists worked in established traditions, with Pichard drawing upon the inspiration of Robert Crumb and de Roover designing in the Belgian graphic style of ligne claire, initiated by Tintin’s creator Hergé. A close friend of Hergé was another Belgian, Marcel Stobbaerts, whose primary coloured and cartoonish illustrations of Pibrac from 1933- in which sexual explicitness and ribald humour combine- would seem to be another source of inspiration for de Roover.

Even more recently, the British artist, Robin Ray (born 1924), who uses the pseudonym Erich von Götha, illustrated an edition of a play by Louys, La Sentiment de la famille. Ray is known for the erotic and sadomasochist content of his illustrations and comic books. His most famous work is the series The Troubles of Janice, set in the time of the Marquis de Sade. The emergence of adult ‘comix’ (with an emphasis on the ‘x’) has provided a new medium for the presentation of Louys’ works to a modern audience.

The design of pin-up images is also something for which quite a few of the illustrators of Louys have been known. Early in his career, Georges Pichard honed his characteristic female character in such images (see above). The same is true of René Ranson (Trois Filles, 1936) and Raymond Brenot (an edition of Sanguines, 1961)- their partially nude figures were often incorporated into adverts and calendars for products such as motor oil (see commercial art later).

Children’s Books

A form of illustration related to comics and cartoons is that of children’s books, and the list of artists who provided plates for these- but who also worked on texts by Louys- includes Pierre Lissac, both Pierre and Maurice Leroy, Rojan, Maurice Julhès, Pierre Rousseau and Renée Ringel.  Although there was an obvious gulf between the books’ contents, those artists working in the junior, as well as adult, markets had very valuable skills and were plainly in demand.  Publishers appreciated that they could instantly capture the essence of a scene in a concise and attractive image- one that could not just complement but enhance and propel forward the narrative beside which it was printed.

René Ranson, ‘Hello sailor’

Commercial Art

Another branch of commercial art that also provided employment for talented draughtsmen was found in the continual demand for posters and advertisements and many significant painters and illustrators also made (or supplemented) a living by such work.  Amongst the artists who undertook commercial design work (as well as illustrating works by Louys) were Nathan Iasevich Altman and Jean Berque (Bilitis, 1932 and 1935 respectively), Pierre Bonnard (Crepuscule des nymphes, 1946), André Dignimont (Bilitis, 1947) and Maurice Leroy (Bilitis, 1948) in addition to which there were those artists who were illustrators of multiple works by Louys- such as André Collot and André-Edouard Marty.  Amongst the many multitalented and adaptable artists whose commissions included illustrations for magazines as well as Louys’ books were Georges Barbier, Luc Lafnet, Rojan and Louis Icart.

Finally, theatrical design was another source of income for jobbing artists, and illustrators who earned additional money creating sets and costumes included René Ranson and Georges Barbier.  Barbier also designed jewellery whilst the painter and illustrator Pierre Bonnard made furniture.

Raymond Brenot

French Literature

Furthermore, Pierre Louys did not write in an artistic vacuum, neither literary or pictorial.  His period saw not just an outpouring of cheap porn paperbacks alongside frank, sexually themed poetry and novels from authors like Collette, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Apollinaire; there were also regular reissues of earlier texts- for instance, new editions of eighteenth-century work by Casanova, Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereux) and, of course, the rediscovered and newly popularised Marquis de Sade.  Very many of these volumes were illustrated- very frequently by the same artists who worked on titles by Louys. 

Independent of literary erotica, and the illustrations that accompanied those works, it’s important to notice that artists were also producing their own freestanding portfolios of adult imagery.  The Austrian Franz von Bayros (1866-1924) is particularly significant in this genre, but French/ Belgian artists André Collot and Martin van Maele, and Russian émigré Rojan, deserve mention because all three also provided plates for books by Louys.  Van Maele and von Bayros shared a distinctly gothic or grotesque taste; all of them explored the complex but controversial interplay between sex, sexuality, perversion and various degrees of force and violence (see too Jules Pascin’s pen drawings and his 1933 portfolio Erotikon or the Sade-inspired portfolios of Fameni Leporini).

What these conjunctions emphasise is the fact that the illustrators just mentioned didn’t only respond to the content of the texts by Louys upon which they were commissioned to work. Their independent collections demonstrate that those books were merely reflective of wider interests and obsessions in European society at that time.  However, the purely visual representation of these themes in the portfolios brings these themes more starkly and unavoidably to our attention.  Decadence and Bohemianism were not just meaningless labels- in the books and etchings we are often witnessing the first stirrings of sexual liberation and a permissive society.  Louys- along with many others- was a harbinger of these shifts in social attitudes, although he may have felt that his promotion of Greek social values and an openness to greater diversity and freedom of personal expression fell on deaf ears in his time.

Summary

In conclusion, the illustrated editions of the many novels and poetry collections of Pierre Louys stand as a remarkable body of collaborative creativity, a literary and artistic legacy deserving of much wider critical study and popular appreciation.  These joint productions underline the degree to which individual artists depend upon the work of others.  Pierre Louys’ achievements arose upon the foundations of previous writers, painters and illustrators, who had created an aesthetic and intellectual environment within which he could develop his own particular vision.  As for the craftsmen and women whose images enhanced his words, this brief review repeatedly demonstrates how multi-talented they were, able to produce memorable designs in a wide range of media.

A longer, fully annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920

‘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

Living in the past?- shaping a classical future in writings of Pierre Louys

Henri Gerbault, Jeunes Trottins

In several previous posts I have talked about what’s been labelled the ‘Romantic‘ view of childhood by art and cultural historians. My feeling is that the French author Pierre Louys cannot be said to have been in sympathy with that- in part because he was not in sympathy with many of the wider themes in Romanticism either, such as the key idea of the relationship between humans and the natural world. He would not have sympathised either with their rejection of classicism nor with the notion of artistic creation ‘ex nihilo‘ without the example of previous works. Citation, imitation and- even- parody of earlier literature were a very important aspect of Louys’ writing technique, as I’ve described before. I’ll say more about his relationship to the classical past shortly, but so far as youth and growing up were concerned, I feel he was probably unconvinced by the Romantic notion of a separate state of childhood- and this because the world he depicted in his work was a harshly practical one. Those works of Louys that were set in contemporary France- mainly his poetry- describe a tough world in which livings had to be earned from an early age. His verse is populated with actresses, dancers, apprentices and the so-called trottins (trotters)- errand girls who worked for seamstresses and milliners. These girls worked hard, long hours to scrape an income together and the poet represented their lives honestly and unromantically. His classical world, especially the story Aphrodite, reflects the same economic exigencies, with its peripatetic entertainers and temple courtesans.

Pierre Louys was not, it seems to me, a man at home in the modern world of late nineteenth and early twentieth century France. His first two novels, Aphrodite and Les Chansons de Bilitis, of course were recreations of a classical Hellenic past that may never have existed, and much of his subsequent work similarly sought to remove itself from the contemporary world: The Twilight of the Nymphs and numerous of his other short stories chose classical and Egyptian settings (The Wearer of Purple and Dialogue at Sunset in Sanguines are examples and in A New Sensation, Callisto actually intrudes into a modern Parisian apartment). His major novel Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1900) is set in a pagan land that borders modern France but shares none of its customs or morality; what’s more, the book is one of Louys’ most ostentatiously literary works, being replete with epigraphs drawn principally from French authors of the seventeenth century and earlier- as well as from classical writers- and many of the story’s names and ideas are classically derived. The unpublished novels L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve and L’Ile aux dames are both set in imaginary lands; Gonzalve may ostensibly be Christian, but none of his behaviour is, whilst his utopian Ile aux dames (like Pausole’s realm of Trypheme) exists outside familiar moral codes.

As for Louys himself, after about 1910 he retreated more and more from publishing and engagement with social life, becoming an almost total recluse behind drawn curtains in his last years. The horrors of the Great War might well have accelerated this withdrawal from a monstrous contemporary reality. 

Trottins in the street

Louys created for himself worlds in which the rules for conduct imposed upon him by religion and state simply didn’t apply. He proposed societies in sexualities were entirely liberated, so that preferences such same-sex attractions or incest were unremarkable and entirely acceptable- just as in Greek myth they were addressed dispassionately and unremarkably. I feel sure, as well, that Louys drew upon the philosophical arguments of the Marqus de Sade in doing this. In Philosophy dans le Boudoir and his many other works (such as Justine and Juliette), de Sade appealed to ‘Nature’ as the source of right behaviour and the measure of what was good. He contended that, if Nature had created the desire and ability to enjoy a certain pleasure, it could not therefore be wrong or unnatural. This argument, flawed as it frequently was, justified for the Marquis almost any sexual preference and nearly all forms of conduct. Louys did not pursue de Sade to the extremes to which his reasoning led- that only one’s personal pleasure counted and that anything done in pursuit of it was justified. Equally, rather than being guided by a self-defined notion of ‘Nature,’ Louys preferred to rely upon a reconstruction of ancient Greek paganism, but within this framework, he could endorse a considerable degree of liberalism- and even libertinism. Another major difference between Louys and de Sade is that the former shared none of the political interests of the Marquis. De Sade was a passionate pacifist and played a role in the French Revolution: Louys was very much a product of aestheticism and decadence. His focus was physical sensation alone so that, whilst he shared certain sensual tastes with de Sade, Pierre Louys restricted himself to these. I have described his utopias before; what is notable about them is the fact that all we learn of their laws and customs is concerned with personal relationships. Louys was almost entirely uninterested in looking beyond these subjects to broader social structures or issues of power and control.

Steinlen, Les deux trottins, 1902

The freedom and self-expression that Louys described and championed can seem far ahead of its time (although arguably it’s achieved by looking backwards into a past that, as I’ve said, may never have existed). Quite often, the results can seem refreshingly free of guilt and repression; sometimes, however, they can verge on the unpleasant extremities to which de Sade tended. King Gonzalve’s uninhibited indulgence of malign plans for his twelve daughters is not only monotonous but calculating, callous and repellent. He is a character with whom it’s virtually impossible to sympathise or identify and, whilst it may be possible to regard the princesses as liberated, they might might more properly be viewed as abused and depraved by an exploitative upbringing. Certainly, Louys has the situation backfire upon the self-centred monarch, a circumstance which can scarcely be regarded as endorsement of his conduct.

Arguably, Louys created a fantasy world in his fiction in which his personal obsessions could be acted out. Because those tastes and inclinations often clashed with the prevailing ideas of the society in which he lived, he chose to imagine societies in which the preconceptions and judgments he disliked had no place; he rejected not just certain moral presumptions but the entire philosophical and theological framework that supported them. In essence (just like de Sade) Louys appear to have felt that whatever gave pleasure was, by definition, good and permissible. Beyond that, all rules and limits were to him artificial.

Pierre Bonnard, Trottins, 1927

I think that all the indications of his writing are that Louys felt little sympathy for the mores of his era and consciously adopted a ‘pre-modern’ view of society. Instead, the writer chose a classical, pagan past as the forum for his imaginings for a variety of reasons. There were various existing precedents for doing so. One was the neo-classical revival in art that had occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Artists such as Lord Leighton, Lorenz Alma-Tadema and Sir Edward Poynter recreated the Greek and Roman worlds on canvas, using them as settings within which contemporary problems might be addressed examined obliquely. Secondly, as Louys knew very well, many of the ideas and attitudes that he espoused found expression- if not support- in ancient texts. There were clearly erotic sources, such as the Satyricon, but scattered across numerous authors and forms (plays, epigrams, poems) there were multiple other source materials that could be mined. An example occurs in Les Chansons de Bilitis in which Louys elaborated upon a slight remark by Dionysius the Sophist. He had composed a short verse “Little vendor of roses, you are as fair as your flowers. But what are you selling- yourself, or your roses, or both?” Song 129 of Bilitis developed this brief scene: the girl and her sister are asked the question by a group of young men. Just like the Parisian trottins mentioned earlier, the girls need to earn an income to avoid a beating from their mother, so they go with the men. The woman describing this incident tells Bilitis that the sisters “didn’t even know how to smile.” What I understand her to say here is that they had not yet learned to feign delight and passion with every customer, regardless of their own wishes and feelings. This was Louys’ primary judgment on the scenario. What is striking for me is how he drew frequently upon his comprehensive knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics to find a text to spoke to contemporary concerns as he saw them in the world around him. This could provide a distance to discuss current problems whilst still remaining connected and engaged.

In the imaginary worlds of Pierre Louys, brought to life time after time in his poetry and prose, matters of gender, generation or consanguinity were treated as being of little consequence; rather he envisaged a continuum of experiences in which financial necessity contended with personal circumstances, societal expectations and church (and state) rules that seemed detached from the realities of many lives. For more detail on the writing of Louys and for further commentary upon this, see my separate pages. A full, annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

A trottin making deliveries for a milliner

Two Less Well Known Illustrators of Pierre Louys

Vertès, Blond Girl

Marcel Vertès (1895-1961) was a costume designer and illustrator of Hungarian-Jewish origins. He was born in Budapest and his first commercially successful works of art were sketches of corpses, criminals and prostitutes he made for a sensationalist magazine in Budapest (he subsequently published a portfolio of this work as Prostitution in 1925). Vertès later provided illustrations for many of the clandestinely printed publications opposed the continuation of the Hapsburg monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War.

After the Great War, Vertès moved first to Vienna and thence, in 1925, to Paris, where he became a student of fine art at the prestigious Academie Julian. He quickly established himself on the Paris art scene, concentrating on illustration, painting and printmaking, especially lithography. He became a close friend and disciple of fellow émigré Jules Pascin, with whom he shared many tastes and interests.

Amongst the work Vertès undertook were forgeries of Toulouse-Lautrec’s works, which helped him earn his art tuition fees. His illustration commissions included working on various erotic books, which included several works by Pierre Louys. Amongst the titles Vertès illustrated were La Semaine Secrete de Venus, 1926, which was written by Pierre Mac Orlan, a leading author of erotic and spanking fiction during the interwar period in Paris (and another friend of Pascin’s); also Collette’s Cheri in 1929 and the collection of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems, Ombre de mon Amour, in 1956. These may all have led to his commissions to work on several books by Louys, but it may also have helped that Vertès (like Toulouse Lautrec and Jules Pascin before him) seemed to have a good knowledge of the world of Parisian brothels, as demonstrated by his album of colour lithographs, Dancings (Dancing Halls) which he produced soon after his arrival in Paris in 1925.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1940

The artist first tackled Pierre Louys’ novel Trois Filles de leur mere in 1927. His seventeen dry-point prints were graphically faithful to the text; Vertès depicted all the perversities of the family at the heart of the novella. Next, Vertès illustrated Pybrac in 1928, unflinchingly recording the highly varied sex and sexuality that features in the hundreds of short poems that make up the collection. The artist also contributed plates to an edition of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole in 1932, which faithfully detailed the incidents of the story in thirty-eight pen and ink drawings. Six years later, he tackled Pierre Louys’ Poésies érotiques. Much like Rojan’s version of the previous year, Vertès provided thirty-two pencil and watercolour plates that fully portrayed all the lesbian and other incidents narrated in the verses.

Vertès, Three Girls

In 1935 Vertès made his first trip to New York in search of business contacts. Two years later he staged his first one-man exhibition in New York. That same year, in Paris, he provided the fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, with advertisements for her new perfume called Shocking, work that was considered rather suggestive and a little shocking by some in the industry, with their hints of dryads and discrete nakedness. Schiaparelli herself obviously liked the artist’s work, for the campaign ran for seven years.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1944

At the start of Second World War, Vertès returned to New York with his wife, escaping the Nazi invasion of France by just two days. Ten years later, he returned to live in Paris but still maintained his lucrative professional contacts in the USA. These led his work on the 1952 film Moulin Rouge about the life and times of artist Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, for which Vertès won two Academy Awards; in addition, he painted the murals in the Café Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel and in the Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  Furthermore, he designed the sets for Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1956, contributed illustrations to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and was a jury member at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. In France, his work was recognised when he was made an officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 1955, after designing sets for ballets at the Paris Opera. Vertès also published a number of books himself, including The Stronger Sex, Art & Fashion in collaboration with Bryan Holme, It’s All Mental, a satire on psychoanalysis, and Amandes Vert, an illustrated biography.

As his enormously eclectic output will indicate, Vertès was able to work in a variety of styles and media, turning his hand to almost any commission he received.  In this, he resembled many of the illustrators I have described in my postings: whilst they may have regard themselves as painters or engravers, earning an income demanded that they were constantly flexible over subject matter and materials.

Reynard the Fox

Kris de Roover (born 1946) was an artist from Antwerp, Belgium. He studied architecture before becoming an illustrator and, during his career, worked on illustrating a wide range of subjects, including erotica, with his designs being published across Europe and in the USA. De Roover employs revived the ligne claire style of comic art, which was pioneered in Belgium by Herge and other artists at Tintin magazine.

De Roover illustrated a comic strip version of Marcel Russen’s retelling of the medieval tale of Rynaert de Vos (Reynard the Fox, 1999), Die verhalen uit het kasteel der lusten- het verboden boek (1984- which was translated later as ‘The Chateau of Delights,’ 1990) and Pierre Louys’ L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (1990). He also created the children’s comic De Tocht der Petieterkees (The Tour of the Petieterkees, 1989).

My interest here is de Roover’s work on Roi Gonzalve. His previous work on Het kasteel der lusten, had indicated a talent for erotica, but the uncompleted novel by Louys represented a challenge to his representational skills. The origins of the story itself are unclear; the king seems to be an invention of Louys, taking his name from the eleventh century king Gonsalvo of the counties of Sobrabe and Ribagorza in the Pyrenees (and, as such, being a neighbouring realm to the imaginary kingdom of Trypheme in Louys’ Les Aventures du Roi Pausole). The twelve princesses of the full title, and their unnatural relationship with their father, may be an echo of the twelve children that the god Uranus had with his sister Gaia in the Greek myth of the Titans. Moreover, one of these offspring, Cronus, had six children with his sister Rhea and two of these, Zeus and Hera, became husband and wife, although Zeus previously was married to his aunt, Themis, sister of Cronus and Rhea. Rather like cartoonist Georges Pichard in his earlier work illustrating Louys’ Trois filles de leur mere, it seems that the Spanish publisher of Roi Gonzalve considered that a graphic novel style would be the best way of tackling the adult content of the story, thereby creating some distance and unreality. De Roover accordingly seems to have depicted the king as a louche, Lothario-like figure in a dinner jacket with a large seventies moustache, a slightly dodgy looking monarch whose character was well suited to the plot of the unfinished text, such as it is. 

De Roover’s choice of style for the book involved emphasising elements in his previous work: his plates feature strong outlines and very brightly coloured designs, using blocks of colour for each figure or item and depicted in a very simple manner (a style that might be very suitable for a children’s book- although primary tones are distinctly stronger than those he used for Reynaert de Vos in 1999). De Roover surrounded these with a pen and ink border design of female nudes which closely resemble his delicate work in the Kasteel der lusten. These elements further help to reduce the challenging nature of the content and to lighten the mood, by making the novella seem more like an action comic. It’s notable too that de Roover, like Paul-Emile Becat before him, chose to depart from the text of the book and overall raised the ages of the princesses he drew, lessening some of the potentially controversial impact of Louys’ narrative, although his plates are still explicit and are clearly tied to the text with quotations of the passages depicted.

We may well wish to reflect upon the fact that the two most recent illustrators to work upon the posthumously published works of Pierre Louys felt that such a style was more suitable or acceptable. For more discussion of these issues, see my book In the Garden of Aphrodite and also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.

Auguste Brouet- engraver of Parisian street life

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Brouet

Auguste Brouet (1872-1941) was born and raised in a poor family in Paris and its suburbs. As a youth, he became a lithographer’s apprentice, whilst also developing his talent for drawing by attending evening drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts– also including a short stint at the studio of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. From about 1895 he began to earn a living in an etching workshop, making engravings of famous paintings ranging from Rembrandt to Whistler. He supplemented this by producing painted copies of popular contemporary paintings as well as by working as an assistant in the studios of successful and well-known artists, such as Degas and Whistler. 

Brouet, La Parade, 1900

From about 1902, Brouet began to produce his own engravings. His favoured subjects were street scenes in the poor areas of Paris- something he knew well and for which he felt great sympathy. He also depicted dancers, nudes and life in working class bars and theatres, as well as cityscapes and some landscapes. After a period of hardship during the First World War, Brouet’s fortunes began to revive. His work became fashionable through exhibitions, public awards and published articles.

Resting dancers

By the 1920s, Brouet’s had established a reputation and his etchings were in demand. As the market entered a golden age, he also attracted increasing commissions from Parisian publishers for book illustrations, especially from Devambez which was then under the artistic direction of artist Edouard Chimot. Like Chimot himself, Brouet suffered severely from the impact of the market crash and depression of the late ’20s, and he spent most of the rest of his life in poverty.

Salon

Brouet illustrated a considerable number of volumes, including Virgil’s Georgics, several books by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Brouet’s interest in the life of poor working females, especially actresses and dancers, well suited him to working on the work of Pierre Louys. Brouet first began to receive commissions to undertake erotic illustrations in the mid-1920s. The first to be published, in 1926, was Un été à la campagne– a notorious epistolary novel by Gustave Droz which describes two girls’ sexual adventures with a range of partners over one summer in the country.

Brouet’s work in 1933 on Pierre Louys’ Le Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des Douzes Princesses is probably his most daring. The manuscript for this book was unfinished at the author’s death; it was sold by his widow and first published in 1927, illustrated by Paul-Emile Becat. The story concerns a king with incestuous desires for his twelve daughters; in its unfinished state it is little more than a succession of explicit erotic scenes. Becat’s response to the text was sexually frank, but with aspects of the relationship between king and princesses elided. Brouet created a dozen line drawings to accompany the text which much more faithfully followed the details of the text. Brouet’s associations with less common aspects of sexuality may be judged by two of his nude studies from 1924- one, Small Nude, shows a reclining girl of ten or eleven from behind; far more interesting, though, is Les Etheromanes (The Etheromaniacs)- two naked young women side by side on a bed, one of whom is holding a small glass. We are to understand that the couple are drinking ether, a late-nineteenth and early twentieth century drug habit practised to induce euphoria. It’s not clear whether they may be using ether to enhance physical sensations or whether the implication is that they are prostitutes who are numbing themselves to their work.

Benezit’s Dictionnaire des Peintres describes Brouet as “a sensitive interpreter of the authors of his choice.” His work is constantly attractive, partly for his skilled technique but also for his subject matter, which gives a real insight into everyday metropolitan life for ordinary Parisians. The website auguste-brouet.org is devoted entirely to his work. For more discussion of subjects covered here, see my book In the Garden of Aphrodite and also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.

Reclining dancer

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.