“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.

The depiction of women in the illustrated works of Pierre Louys

by Paul Gervais

The illustrated novels of Pierre Louys are instructive in many ways. Primarily, of course, they reveal evolving artistic responses to the author’s prose and verse, thereby not just illustrating his personal vision but demonstrating- indirectly- what book purchasers were understood to want, and what publishers and their commissioned artists believed they could offer them, within the parameters of law and public decency. In other words, the nature of illustrations can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women.

Louys’ first books appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, notably Les Chansons de Bilitis in 1894 and Aphrodite in 1896. The earliest illustrated editions are distinctly reflective of their era, tacitly articulating contemporary attitudes towards the female gender and the position of women in society. Librairie Borel‘s 1899 edition of Aphrodite, illustrated by Antoine Calbet, is a case in point: his depictions of Chrysis reflect the Academic tradition of life studies, derived from the classical artistic tradition since the Renaissance, and the young Galilean courtesan is depicted very much in the style of Greek statues of Aphrodite and paintings of Venus by Botticelli, Tiziano Vecelli and others thereafter.

The title pages of the Calbet edition

Likewise, when Georges Rochegrosse provided plates for an edition of Ariadne in 1904, what he supplied was a very revealing reflection of the period’s conceptions of bacchantes- frenzied women. In the plate illustrated below, they are seen wreathed in ivy and flowers and leopard skin, about to tear apart the helpless Ariadne. Elsewhere in the same volume, Greek ladies were presented as sedate, respectable, elegant, graceful and beautiful- as in the illustration that accompanied the preamble to The House on the Nile by Paul Gervais, which is seen at the head of this post.

As I have described in other posts, numerous further illustrated editions of the various books written by Louys were to follow, both before and after his decease in 1925. A constant feature of these was women in greater or lesser states of undress, plates that faithfully responded to the text but also very consciously appealed to the primarily male collectors of fine art limited editions of books. Amongst these many examples, the most interesting are probably those designed by women. Those volumes worked on by Suzanne Ballivet, Mariette Lydis and Clara Tice are notable for the quality of their work and for the fact that the latter two were lesbian and brought their own sense of eroticism to their reactions to the texts. So, for example, in her plates for the 1934 edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis, Lydis’ vision of female lovers was far more intimate and subtly sensual than most of the works produced by male contemporaries- such as J A Bresval (see below). Other women who worked on the various titles by Louys included Renee Ringel (Aphrodite, 1944), Yna Majeska (Psyche, 1928), Guily Joffrin (Psyche, 1972) and editions of Bilitis illustrated by Jeanne Mammen, Genia Minache (1950), Carola Andries (1962) and Monique Rouver (1967). The frequency with which female illustrators were employed as the century passed is noticeable, although I hesitate to identify a distinctly feminine style.

Maritte Lydis, plate for Bilitis, 1934

Post-war, new editions of Louys introduced us to new conceptions of his female characters. J. A. Bresval illustrated an edition of Bilitis in 1957, his figures being very much inspired by contemporary film stars like Gina Lollobrigida and Brigitte Bardot. The women have a dark-haired fulsomeness typical of the period; the eroticism is rather cliched, such as the frontispiece to the book, which shows Bilitis with a lover: the latter kneels before her partner, embracing her waist and kissing her stomach; the standing woman cups her breasts in her hands and throws back her head in a highly stereotypical soft-porn rendering of female ecstasy.

However, by 1961 and Raymond Brenot’s watercolours for a new edition of Sanguines, we see a new aesthetic of the female body beginning to emerge: the bosoms may be just as fantastical, but there is a slenderness and, in some of the clothes, a sense of a more liberated and relaxed mood. Pierre-Laurent (Raymond) Brenot (1913-98) was a painter who was also very much in demand to design record sleeves, advertisements and fashion plates (for such couturiers as Dior, Balenciaga, Ricci and Lanvin). More tellingly, he is known as the ‘father of the French pin-up’- consider, for example, his advert for lingerie manufacturer Jessos- “Comme maman, je porte un Jessos” declares a young teen with pigtails, seated with her blouse unbuttoned to reveal her bra (“just like my mum’s”); I have discussed this style of marketing in another post. Brenot’s poster designs, for consumer goods, holiday destinations and films and theatres, regularly featured glamorous young women and, when this work declined during the later 1960s, he returned to painting, producing many young female nudes.

Brenot, Parrhasius in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ from Sanguines

What has to be observed, though, is that most of the nudity portrayed by Brenot was not justified by the actual stories in Sanguines. There are some naked slaves in The Wearer of Purple (see below), and Callisto in A New Sensation does share a bed with the narrator, but most of the rest of the stories are really quite respectable and sex-free (by the standards of Louys), being more concerned with psychology than sexuality. What we see, therefore, is evidence for the tendency to treat the works of Louys as a platform for erotic illustration. Frequently, this was a distinct element in the author’s stories, but it seems that he had acquired a reputation for sexiness which was then applied more liberally, presumably in the knowledge that the name would sell. The same criticism can, in truth, be made of Georges Rochegrosse’s depiction of the bacchae in the 1904 edition of Ariadne (see earlier): what he depicted might perhaps be implied in the text, but what Louys wrote doesn’t wholly warrant the nudity that we see:

“They wore fox skins tied over their left shoulders. Their hands waved tree branches and shook garlands of ivy. Their hair was so heavy with flowers that their necks bent backwards; the folds of their breasts streamed with sweat, the reflections on their thighs were setting suns, and their howls were speckled with drool.”

Ariadne, c.2

Brenot, Callisto in ‘A New Sensation’ from Sanguines

The men who feature in Brenot’s illustrations often seem hesitant, ill at ease or, even, embarrassed at being discovered with the women in their company- his take on the ‘satyrs’ with nymph in a scene from ‘The Wearer of Purple’ is a case in point. In Louys’ story, this is an incident involving a slave girl being assaulted by two other servants so as to create a titillating composition for the the artist Parrhasius to paint. As we can see in the reproduction below, the satyrs appear afraid of the young woman, having lost all their accustomed priapism, whilst she strikes me as indifferent to their presence and in fully control of the situation. Given Brenot’s later output, it’s almost certainly overstating things to say that these plates reflect shifts in social attitudes.

Brenot, two satyrs & a nymph in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ in Sanguines

Coming right up to date, the 1999 edition of Aphrodite demonstrates how visions of women may have developed and advanced (or not). The book was issued in three volumes, the first two being illustrated by two male comic book artists, Milo Manara and Georges Bess respectively. Both have distinctly erotic styles and the results strike me as being, in essence, highly accomplished and artistic reproductions of glamour photography and lesbian porn; for example, George Bess’ picture of the reclining woman, which faces the start of Book 2, chapter 1 of the story, seems to me to be drawn in a style very much influenced by Mucha or Georges du Feure: the streaming hair and the encroaching, twisting foliage all have the hallmarks of Art Nouveau (which is of course highly appropriate given the publication date of the original book). In the modern version, Chrysis is regularly depicted in intimate scenes alone, with her maid Djala or with the two girls Rhodis and Myrtocleia. With their tousled hair, pouting lips and pneumatic breasts, these women are very much the late twentieth century ideal. Most of the time, they are presented as being more interested in each other than in any of the male characters in the story, but my response is that there are really rather high-quality examples of fairly standard pornographic obsessions. When we look at them, it’s worth recalling Pierre Louys’ own description of his heroine, when he wrote to the painter Albert Besnard asking to paint her:

“Chrysis, as womanly as possible- tall, not skinny, a very ‘beautiful girl.’ Nothing vague or elusive in the forms. All parts of her body have their own expression, apart from their participation in the beauty of the whole. Hair golden brown, almost Venetian; very lively and eventful, not at all like a river. Of primary importance in the type of Chrysis, the mouth having all the appetites, thick and moist- but interesting […] Painted lips, nipples and nails. Depilated armpits. Twenty years old; but twenty years in Africa.”

Aphrodite, chapter 1, Milo Manara, 1999

Bess, plate for Aphrodite, 1999, Book 2, c.1, ‘The Garden of the Goddess’

A fascinating contrast to the the first two volumes of the 1999 edition is to be found in the third, illustrated by Claire Wendling (born 1967). She is a French author of comic books and her response to the text is interesting because it is so much darker and less obviously ‘sexy’ than that of her male collaborators. The plates are, literally, dark in tone and, although they tend to focus on solo female nudes, rather than lascivious eroticism is there is a mood of mental and physical suffering entirely appropriate to the final section of the book, in which Chrysis is arrested, sentenced to death, executed and buried. Her cover image evokes- for me- thoughts of Gustav Klimt in its decoration, but the twisted, crouched posture of the woman doesn’t look seductive- rather she’s supplicatory or, possibly, predatory.

At the start of this post I proposed that the book illustrations published with successive editions of the works of Pierre Louys can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women. I think that this is true, but that the evidence does not necessarily reveal huge steps forward in those areas. Far more women are involved now in commercial art, and the works of Louys provide vehicles for the expression of lesbian desire on their own terms: albeit in the service of illustrating books written by a man in which his sympathetic views of same-sex attraction compete with heterosexual masculine eroticism. Art styles have evolved, but the attitudes expressed by what’s depicted have not necessarily developed at the same pace.

‘The Adventure of King Pausole’- editions from 1930

Marcel Vertes, 1930

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

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

Vertes, 1930

Tsuguharu Leonard Foujita, 1931

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

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

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

Daniel Girard, 1931, Galatee spying on Aline & Mirabelle

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

Girard, frontispiece

Lydis, 1934

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

Lydis, 1934

Jacques Touchet, 1937

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

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

Touchet, 1939

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

Ballivet, 1945

Henriette Bellair, 1946

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

Becat, 1947

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

Becat, Pausole & his new wife Philis

Poulain, 1947

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

Touchagues 1947

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

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

Schem 1950

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

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

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

Sexualities in Art 5: Mariette Lydis and the Books of Pierre Louys

Bilitis

Mariette Lydis (1887–1970) was an Austrian-Argentinian painter. She was born Marietta Ronsperger in Vienna, the third child of a Jewish merchant family. She first married Julius Koloman Pachoffer-Karñy in 1910, and, over the next twenty years or so, went through another two husbands, including Jean Lydis, whom she married in 1918 and whose surname she retained for professional purposes. The reason for this chequered marital history is revealed by the fact that, having fled the Nazi invasion of France, from 1940 until her death in 1970, she lived in Argentina with her partner Erica Marx (niece of Karl).

Lydis was a self-taught artist. In 1925, she moved to Paris and got involved in the art scene there, soon developing a reputation as a talented painter and illustrator. She began to exhibit her work in solo shows and illustrated books by many authors including Henry de Montherlant, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and Pierre Louÿs. Her reputation as an up-and-coming avant-garde artist was established, although the war and her exile to London and then South America inevitably interrupted this.

La petite danseuse, 1956

Portrait of a young girl

In 1948 Lydis returned to France and resumed worked for publishers, illustrating works by Guy de Maupassant, Colette, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Henry James. Lydis eventually returned to Buenos Aires and her later work is notable for its brighter tones and focus on women, adolescents, and young children. as subjects (see for example, her oil paintings Jeune femme de profil (1933), Portrait de jeune fille (1955), and Jovencita (1950)). Over her career, Lydis primarily created lithographs, but she also worked in pencil, watercolour, charcoal, etching and oils, producing prints, drawings, and paintings. Her drawing style is delicate and sparing and she is an accomplished draughtswoman; Lydis could, perhaps, be criticised for the fact that the women in her pictures all look the same, but this could of course be more a matter of celebrating her ideal than any want of skill.

Lydis, Bilitis, 1948

Along with her book illustrations, Lydis is known for her portfolios of lithographs depicting lesbian and bisexual relationships. She tended to show her female couples in active/ passive roles, derived from the stereotype of heterosexual relationships. The illustration to Bilitis, song 53, in which Bilitis and Mnasidika marry in a ceremony invented by Louys for classical Greece (see above) is a good example of this; the older partner is subtly, but discernibly female, a bold statement for its time, perhaps. Lydis was criticised for such representations of dykes and femmes and some of her images were described as “perverse.” However, a review of one of her exhibitions in 1931 perceptively praised her work because it “represents the feminine outlook [and] gives us a facet of truth as seen by feminine eyes…”

from Sappho, ‘Ode to a beloved Woman’

Lydis produced several lesbian collections, almost definitely reflecting her own bisexuality.  These include Lesbiennes (1926) and Sappho (1933), which feature couples and threesomes making love.  She then illustrated a 1934 editions of Pierre Louys’ La Femme et le pantin, Sanguines, Bilitis and Aphrodite, in the second of which she concentrated almost solely on the female and lesbian aspects of the story. She later created a second set of plates for a further edition of Louys’ other lesbian classic, Les Chansons de Bilitis, in 1948. Some artists, in working on Bilitis, have chosen play down certain aspects of the text. One is the powerful same-sex desire of Louys’ songs: their un-abashed celebration of longing and attraction are the reason why Louys has gained a reputation as a sympathetic ‘champion’ of lesbian love. The age-discrepant nature of Bilitis’ taste in lovers is also frequently elided; the illustrations to the 1948 edition by Mariette Lydis are- like those of Almery Lobel Riche in 1937- amongst these (Lobel-Riche turned his Greek women into society flappers in 1930s Paris, for example). A contrast may be made here with plates created by Suzanne Ballivet, who was quite uninhibited in her depictions of young women in passionate love when she was commissioned to work on Louys’ Les Aventures du Roi Pausole. Lydis, by contrast, was far more restrained; her images are often close up studies of her subjects’ heads, or else of their torsos, so whilst their nudity is clear, the context is only suggested rather than explicitly portrayed. The illustration from Sappho above is a good example of this. That’s not to say that Lydis didn’t sometimes go for frank passion: her plates for a 1949 edition of Paul Verlaine’s Parallelement (1867), for instance, tackles the sonnet Les Amies (The Female Lovers) directly, showing the pair entwined during lovemaking. Often, though, the artist’s couples are much more meditative- perhaps post-coital, certainly simply enjoying companionship and simple loving proximity. Verlaine, like Louys, was very positive in his approach to same-sex passion, marking something of a break with poets like Baudelaire, whose Damned Women dealt with the same kind of scenario but in a much more ‘Gothic’ manner.

Overall, the delicacy of Lydis’ drawings perfectly capture the tenderness of love whilst her portraits are delicate and full of charm. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. For more details of the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography page for him. For more general information, see my recommended reading page.

Lydis, Bilitis

Young Girl with Flowers & Butterfly

Paris- city of pleasure

In 2019, the French author Alexandre Dupouy published City of Pleasure: Paris Between the Wars, a study of the diverse and liberated culture of the French capital in the inter-war period. He explains how, after the austerity and horror of First World War, the French longed for a care-free existence, sensuous indulgence- and sexual freedom. Men and newly-emancipated women alike rejected pre-war social values and moral restraints and instead enthusiastically embraced new lifestyles, discovering a lust for extravagance, pleasure and erotic experimentation that led to the next two decades being labelled the ‘mad years’ and Paris gaining a reptation as the ‘City of Pleasure.’

In 1971, the author Paul Morand, looked back at the era in his travel book Venises and explained: “Everything that had happened in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the revolution in morals that had begun in 1917. A generation was returning from the war, sickened by yesterday, curious about tomorrow, about those who would know how to explain it to them and reveal to them this new world…” The mood had changed and there was an acute hunger to live- as so many no longer did.

Dupouy’s book offers an uncensored photographic record of the period, revealing the daring erotic life of the capital, its fetish scene, its licensed brothels and gay nightclubs, the first sex shop chains, erotic photography, pornography, and much more. Paris became, perhaps, the world’s most decadent city.

In many respects, though, none of this was new. The ‘Gay Paris’ of the fin-de-siecle is renowned, with the can-can dancers of the Moulin Rouge and the many artists who documented the period- such as Jules Pascin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Other capital cities, too, reacted to the end of the Great War in similar ways: the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret is an obvious example; nonetheless, Paris seemed to take matters further.

Paris already had an well-established ‘alternative’ scene: lesbian culture in the city was well-developed before 1914 and daring artists and writers were associated with a bohemian and progressive lifestyle. Nevertheless, the post-war reaction seems to have accentuated these existing trends, which were further fuelled by artistic movements such as Surrealism (who, by the way, championed the work of the Marquis de Sade, an early promoter of alternative sexualities) .

I have often written about Pierre Louys. His late nineteenth century books, Aphrodite and Chansons de Bilitis, had depicted lesbian relationships in an entirely accepting and very open manner. He carried on writing into the next century, but ceased to publish after about 1906. When Louys died in 1925, a wealth of daringly, scandalously erotic books were uncovered in manuscript, titles such as poetry collections Pybrac and Cydalise and the outrageous novella Trois filles de leur mere, and their publication in the following years is symbolic of the fact that France- and especially Paris- was a centre for an active erotic book trade. A flood of titles appeared, dealing with lesbian sex, spanking and leather fetishism (often all in the same story), materially enhancing the reputation of Paris as the city where absolutely anything could be experienced.

This was not a hidden nor a shameful trade. Notable Impressionist artists such as Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre illustrated works by Louys, as did costume designer Marcel Vertes and art deco jeweller Georges Barbier. The painter Leo Fontan both wrote and illustrated spanking erotica, as did the Expressionist Nicolas Sternberg and the Belgian Luc Lafnet, whose BDSM illustrations were a source of additional income to (believe it or not) his main work painting religious murals in monasteries and churches.

Interwar Paris is a fascinating place, a melting pot of radical art, philosophy, politics and new approaches to sexuality. There will be much more to say about the city. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page.

Leo Fontan

Girls in Trees- dryads, hamadryads and the cult of the nymph

Marty, Illustration for Bilitis, 1937

The wood-nymphs, the dryads and hamadryads, have been understood since antiquity to have a powerful bond with the trees with which they are linked. They bear the trees names (as with caryatids, the nymphs of the nut trees), they live amongst them and- in the case of hamadryads, they live within them. The hamadryad is the soul, the animating spirit, of the tree which she inhabits and their continued existences are inseparably intertwined. To fell a tree is to murder the dryad within- and it can lead to grief and vengeance on the part of her sisters. This is most melodramatically expressed in Gabriel Guay’s 1891 canvas, Le mort du chene (The Death of the Oak).

Guay, La mort du chene

There is plentiful scope for confusion between nymphs and flesh and blood females, and it is not always easy to tell from some paintings whether the artist is truly presenting a nymph or was simply painting a ‘nymph’- a model who just happened to have stripped off in a quiet woodland glade to bask in the sunshine and was, therefore, only figuratively a nymph in the sense of a being young female. If we add to the mix a suggestion that a country girl might be a bit wild in spirit and would allow her uninhibited nature to show, the confusion or cross-over could be compounded.

Joseph Tomanek, Nymph in a Tree

Enter Pierre Louys. I’ve often mentioned his 1894 book, Les Chansons de Bilitis, a pastiched lesbian autobiography purporting to descend from antique times. It’s full of fairly explicit sex- and it starts as it means to go on. The second chapter of the first part is titled ‘The Tree.’ Bilitis is still a young girl, a ‘nymphet,’ perhaps. She goes out into the countryside one day:

“I undressed to climb a tree; my naked thighs embraced the smooth and humid bark; my sandals climbed upon the branches.

High up, but still beneath the leaves and shaded from the heat, I straddled a wide-spread fork and swung my feet into the void.

It had rained. Drops of water fell and flowed upon my skin. My hands were soiled with moss and my heels were reddened by the crushed blossoms.

I felt the lovely tree living when the wind passed through it; so I locked my legs tighter, and crushed my open lips to the hairy nape of a bough.”

Needless to say, several illustrators of Louys work have seized upon this just episode as much as her affairs with her younger girlfriends- as we see from the examples by Marty (above), Harry G. Spanner (1926) and others below.

Suzanne Ballivet, Bilitis, 1943

Sylvain Sauvage, Bilitis, 1927

Carefree girls swinging in trees can be expressive of all sorts of things- of a simple, naturist pleasure of playing in the sun; of a unity with the natural world and, it follows, with a more natural upbringing in the countryside, away from the city. Louys, however, responded to another strand of late nineteenth century thinking. Rather than seeing rural childhood as innocent Eden, various writers and psychologists (such as Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and Emil Schultze-Malkowsky) argued that exposure to nature only served to teach children about sex at an early age. Watching all those wild animals and livestock just gave impressionable youth ideas, it was warned. If a natural lifestyle was one that corrupted and tempted, it was only a short step back to the nymphs, who were conceived in their very natures to be lusty and active, constantly engaged in sex with Pan and his priapic entourage of satyrs.

Erich Lamm, Nude in a Tree

Paul Leroy, Dans les branches du grand pin

Of course, the nymphs went further than this. They lurked amongst the trees, waiting to pounce on hapless men or passing centaurs, seducing them too. This is one of themes that I particularly pursue in my new book, The Woods are Filled with Gods- Dryads, Satyrs and Centaurs, available now as an e-book and paperback from Amazon/ KDP. The book looks briefly at the origins and history of the nymphs, centaurs and satyrs, but my real interest is how we’ve used these stories in our modern art and literature. I refer (of course) to Pierre Louys, as well as many other poets and artists I’ve discussed, such as writer Clark Ashton Smith and Belgian cartoonist and illustrator Paul Cuvelier.

To celebrate the new book, I’ve also started a new blog, nymphologyblog.wordpress.com.

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

Ballivet, 1931

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

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

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

Aline & Mirabelle

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

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

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

Queen Philis

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

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

Mirabelle & a dancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aline & Mirabelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aline & Mirabelle

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

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

Becat- Giglio helps to disguise Aline

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