A forgotten poem? ‘Maddalou’ by Pierre Louys

There are two versions of the poem Maddalou by Pierre Louys. The first is included amongst a collection of ‘Fourteen Images’ in the second volume of the poet’s Complete Works. It follows the lyrics of Bilitis, indicating that it dates to same period, around 1894.

“Her hair is black; her skin is brown. Around her chest she wears a white rag, which was once a camisole, and which reveals her half-naked.

A red rag serves as her skirt, a rag with more holes than a battle flag.  And that’s all.- she doesn’t have a shirt; her feet are bare as hands.

But what embroidered silk would be more beautiful than this colourful costume of human skin and rags? What jewel purer than the point of her breast?

She moves in the light, without shame and almost without clothing, while I follow the play of shadow and sunlight around her form.”

The second Maddalou, as I have noted before, is a longer poem, published separately after Louys’ death in 1925. I have been able to see a copy of the 1927 edition, held by the British Library, and- because it’s such a rare little book- I’ve reproduced a translation of the French prose poem here.

The physical book itself underlines some of what I’ve said several times previously about the qualities of limited edition fine art printings and how they can interact with the experience of reading the text. As was common practice at the time, the book was issued in a limited run of 400 copies, printed on three grades of paper. The BL copy is number 36 and is on the ‘cheapest’ paper, Velin d’Arches. This is a strong cotton paper, with a fine grain and ‘deckle’ (untrimmed) edges. It has weight and a pleasing grained texture. The book itself comes in a card case that opens to reveal the forty loose pages; these are quite small- called in-huit in French, they’re only about 19 cms tall. It was a delight to see and handle and Edouard Degaine’s illustrations were gorgeous- soft-focus and evocative.

“At the end of the long path which winds between the bushes, I discovered a hovel in the middle of a small garden. It was a poor shack that no one knew, far from hamlets, far from the roads. Never has a tourist, a hunter or a passer-by walked there. It had only one window and just one door. Through the window I saw an old woman seated and, before the door, a young girl was standing. But this young girl was very strange, with rags like a savage and a body so beautiful that I felt myself go pale.

Throughout the day I thought about her and, in the evening, I went back. She came towards me, little by little, curious, but also slightly on her guard, like a tame doe.

‘Who do you want here? My grandmother isn’t at home. Grandma’s left for the town, for the Saturday market. I’m alone- who are you looking for?

I’ll be on my own for another three days. If you want a basket, grandma has taken to them all to sell at the market. You’ll quickly catch up with her on the road running beside the sea.

Why don’t you reply? Why are you just looking at me without saying a word? I haven’t got anything… Only a bowl of milk… and some figs… and water from the spring.

How did they come to live here? She didn’t know anymore: she was little; it was ten or more years ago. Back then, there, one of the men who’d loved her mother had killed her.

Back there, on the other side of the mountains. That was the day when Maddalou was taken away by her grandmother, passing through so many villages. She doesn’t know anything more than that, neither can she read, nor count, nor say where she comes from.

The hovel didn’t belong to them. They are allowed to stay there as an act of charity. By whom? A lady whom they never see, whose name she’s forgotten- but who owns all the land round here.

She responds to me with her head lowered and, when she stops speaking, I no longer even hear the silent footsteps of her bare feet in the dust.

Maddalou, with such black hair, barely covers herself with a red rag which, pierced, torn, slashed, wraps over her chest, and hangs down to her slender heels. She puts this on like a shirt, passing her arms through the tears, then ties it in the middle of her body. It gapes on the side and opens on the thigh- and her feet are bare.

But what silk would dress her better than this motley costume of brown skin and rags? What could be more beautiful than this exposed hip? What jewel could be purer than the tip of her bare breast?

She moves in the light, without shame and almost without clothing, and each of her gestures reveals all her contours to the play of shadow and sun.

‘Oh yes! Yes, stay here with me. I’m alone, I’m miserable. No-one ever comes here, except the seabirds and the birds from the woods. Stay! I’m all alone and I’m bored. I hate to go to work in the fields with my little coat all in rags. The gleaners have all got shoes and they mock my bare feet.

Instead, I go to the deserted willow grove, to harvest the stems. I come back and I weave baskets; I milk the black goats; I sing to myself- and yet, I’m not happy. You’re the first man I’ve seen- the first since… since I’ve been grown up and since I’ve been crying at night without knowing why.

I love life in my rags. I wash them like lace; when I see spots there, I just cut them out and make more holes for the wind to blow through. The holes dress me with my skin; the material covers what it can. If someone were to lie in wait for me in the woods… but no one spies on me in the woods and doesn’t follow me along the path.

On more than one evening, do you want to know how I make my way back from the fountain? With my rags over my arms, completely naked so I can run faster!

Now I’ve told you all my secrets- I’m tired of telling them to myself. I never like the flower I put in my hair, because it was me that gave it to myself.’

The hovel is just a large room covered with a broken roof. Just as Maddalou’s rags tear and show her body, so the roof has holes in and lets you look up at the sky. It lets in the wind and the rain, butterflies and dead leaves, the bats and the birds and, in their turn, the sunshine and the moonlight.

There’s neither a table nor chairs. You sit yourself on empty baskets and you eat off your lap. The bucket, the spindle whorl and the pan hang on the mossy, decaying wall. The goats sleep in one corner, the old woman by the chimney, the mice in the wall, the blue parrot on the rack and the girl under the stairs.

Under an old broken staircase that serves as a perch for the hens and from which she hangs a cloth as a curtain, there Maddalou has her bed. On a mattress of seaweed and tow sleeps the loveliest girl in the world. It’s just a sack laid on the earth, made from lots of saffron bags sewn together with string and somewhat gnawed by rats. A roll of rags serves as her pillow. She only has one sheet: the thin red canvas that she wears as a dress during the day. At night, when she lies down, she’s uncovered down to her feet, her head resting on her hand.

But those who did not see her on this regal bed, half-opening her mouth and stretching out her arms, will die without having known what human splendour can be.”

Maddalou is a very different poem to almost everything else produced by Pierre Louys (and hence nearly every book I’ve described on this blog). It describes a tender, romantic love, which despite the evident impact that the young woman’s partial and unconscious nakedness has on the male narrator, is taken no further. It’s not even clear whether the narrator expresses his admiration for the titular heroine, or just worships her silently. Degaine’s full page illustrations do tend to focus on the naked Maddalou, but the headpieces at the beginning of each section of the prose poem are small landscape scenes, evoking the peaceful, deserted natural world in which the hovel is set.

There are some hints of adult sexuality- and of the potential dangers of the outside world- but Maddalou and her grandmother inhabit a kind of Edenic utopia cut off from the harsh outside world. Their contact with it seems to be limited to selling the baskets at market- something the grandmother undertakes in order (it seems) to protect the girl from the corruption and temptation of the rest of society. There are indications that the maturing young woman is beginning to sense a lack in her life (her loneliness and her tears), and wants more, but she doesn’t yet know what that is.

The encounter between narrator and female household echoes the mise en scene of Trois Filles de leur mere, but the story is otherwise located in a completely different universe. Whether we are even in contemporary France is unclear (although the amphora in Degaine’s frontispiece might suggest not). All in all, the closest parallel in the rest of Louys’ work to this poem is the Dialogue at Sunset, found in Sanguines, which is set in ancient Greece and in which a goatherd and a girl meet, talk and fall in love. That said, Maddalou’s name implies very strongly that the setting is French: as we know from Bilitis and Aphrodite amongst other books, Louys was perfectly capable of coming up with authentic Greek names from the sources he knew so well. Wherever the story takes place, though, Maddalou’s world is innocent, pure and placid and, as the final sentence reveals, it’s held up to us as a model to envy and to imitate.

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

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

Teresa & family by Edouard Chimot

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

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

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

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

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

René Ranson’s title page

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cover of Pichard’s edition

Custom, right & hospitality in the work of Pierre Louys

Louis Icart, Les Chansons de Bilitis, 1949

It seems clear from some of the writings of Pierre Louys that he was aware of ancient practices of hospitality that involved offering a guest a female of the household as a companion for the night. This mark of respect is not the droit de seigneur or jus primae noctis of feudal lordship or certain Middle Eastern societies, but it comes from similar deep roots and is founded in identical systems in which honour, sacrifice and a degree of subservience were fundamental to interpersonal relations. We might borrow the phraseology and term it the jus uni noctis, the right of one night, or- perhaps even better, jus hospitis noctis– the right of a guest for a night.

The clearest manifestation of this is in Louys story The House Upon the Nile, which forms part of the Twilight of the Nymphs (Crepuscule des nymphes) collection of short stories. The House is the odd one out as it is non-mythical, not being concerned with retelling various classical stories of gods and minor divinities like Leda, Byblis or Ariadne. Rather, The House Upon the Nile might be seen as related to the same interests from which the novel Aphrodite– which is set in Ptolemaic Egypt in Alexandria, near the mouth of the Nile- derived. They seem to be of the same time period.

In The House Upon the Nile, a traveller on foot, Bion, comes upon mud hut late one day. There are two girls outside; one is naked because she is still a child, the other is a little older and therefore wears dress. Their father asks the weary Bion to stay overnight and, after they have eaten, he says, “I know the duties of hospitality.  Here are my two daughters.  The youngest has not yet known a man, but she is of an age to come to you.  Go, and take your pleasure in her.”

Bion respects this custom and venerates it “as a tradition of singular virtue.  The gods often visited the earth, dressed as travellers, soldiers or shepherds, and who could distinguish a mortal from an Olympian who did not wish to reveal himself?  Bion was, perhaps, Hermes.  He knew that a refusal on his part would be taken as an insult; thus, he was neither surprised nor troubled when the elder girl bent toward him and uncovered her young breasts so that he might kiss them.”

The younger daughter is upset by her sister’s intervention and runs off into the night, dismaying her father by carrying “away forever the honour of his house.”  Bion spends the night with the older sister and leaves early in the morning.  Sometime later, he encounters the younger girl, who has been waiting along his route to waylay him.  She wants to go with the traveller, thinking herself in love.  He tells her to go home to her father, but cannot get her to see sense, nor can he shake her off.  The man therefore gets her to carry his burden for the day and, that evening, cynically sells her like a slave.

The story ends tragically, but the duties of ancient hospitality are laid out very clearly.  An examination of other works by Louys indicate that he felt that very similar responsibilities still fell upon those offering accommodation or receiving guests, even in the modern world. 

Woodcut for the House on the Nile for a 1926 edition, by Jean Saint-Paul

This duty appears most clearly in commercial situations.  So, for example, in one verse in Pybrac the poet appears to complain about those occasions when, on being unable to supply overnight ‘company’ for a guest, a hotel manageress will present herself at his room door and offer herself instead. Similar solicitude on the part of hotel staff for guest welfare may be detected in the Handbook for Young Girls, which advises the young lady traveller not to ask the hotel manager if the maid offers other entertainment to single female guests, but to approach directly herself.  So too in the Poésies Érotiques, in which one poem depicts a man enquiring from the inn keeper’s daughter the prices for a night’s stay (plus additional services). She seemingly expects this request and promptly offers a scale of charges.

We might even construe the sexual activity in Trois filles de leur mère as an extreme form of hospitality towards a new neighbour.  In the story, a young student moves into his new flat and, within the space of barely twelve hours, has been to bed with the mother and all three of her daughters- a gesture of welcome which is then hospitably continued over the ensuing days.

Illustration by Clara Tice, 1927

Arguably, in Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1900), we see the king himself performing a similarly generous act in reverse when he is the guest of Monsieur Lebirbe.  When his eldest daughter Galatea absconds overnight, whilst the monarch is sleeping in the house, Pausole resolves to try to comfort his host and hostess by making their younger daughter, Philis, his new queen. As is so often the case with Pierre Louys, the ideas he wished to convey were couched in terms of sex and sexuality, but his idea of a hospitable welcome seems nonetheless clear.

Now, a reasonable criticism of Louys might well be that his concept of hospitality was a highly patriarchal one: the father in the House on the Nile disposes of his daughters like chattels. Of course, the author is portraying the customs of a patriarchal ancient society, albeit one he has imagined and was under no obligation to resurrect. The traveller, Bion, also behaves as if the younger daughter is a piece of property he no longer requires when he wearies of her presence. Yet, the daughters both seem to be willing to comply, presumably because they understand that it is a religious as well as a social duty: I think that Louys liked the idea that the ancient deities were constantly present in the world, and perfectly likely to turn up at your door at any moment. As for the other cases I’ve noted, hospitality is offered primarily because it is friendly, pleasing and, in addition, commercially beneficial.

The House on the Nile is a short story in one of the lesser works of the author and poet Pierre Louys. It might well not be appropriate to construct any great theory about the writer’s thinking or philosophy upon it. Nevertheless, I think it gives us some further indications as to his musings about alternative social structures and customs, a microcosm of the utopias that form such a major element in his fiction. Whether located in the distant past or on some distant island, Louys continually speculated about different forms of community and different rules for conduct. In his writing, he intertwined all kinds of ideas and influences, testing theories and playing with citations and styles from other authors. This wasn’t necessarily worked up into any sort of manifesto; instead, it was an evolving game.

If nothing else, Twilight of the Nymphs and The House Upon the Nile have provided a platform for publishers and artists to create beautiful editions of one of Louys’ most charming books. I’ve discussed the interaction of word and imagery elsewhere, but with at least ten different books by Louys being the subject of multiple editions over the last century and a quarter, readers may appreciate how they have come to constitute a major body of illustrative art, showcases for the work of many dozens of artists. The printed works of Pierre Louys therefore represent a substantial resource for art historians and a little explored gallery of genres and individual styles- as I’ve indicated in my posts on Bilitis and Aphrodite.

For more details of the writings of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography, and for more of my essays on his work, see my separate books page. A full, annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

Illustration by Clara Tice, 1927

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

Writing Utopias- from Plato to Thomas More to Pierre Louys

Frontispiece to the 1926 translation of King Pausole, by Clara Tice (Note the motto- suitable for Aleister Crowley!)

Humans have imagined ideal worlds, ever since the time of the Greeks. Plato explored these ideas first in Republic, and then in Timaeus and Critias, when his perfect stated was located on the island of Atlantis. Distant islands are always good sites to choose, because it explains their mystery and their isolation from contamination or conquest by civilisation as we know it.

In 1516 Sir Thomas More composed Utopia, a description of an ideal island that is, in fact, a kind of communist dictatorship: everyone is provided for, as long as they comply with very rigid standards of conduct. For our purposes, and to contrast with Pierre Louys later, I’ll merely note the Utopian rules on dress: they all wear very simple leather overalls for work and a plain cloak for travel- cheap, practical and simple. As for relationships, the Utopians are strictly monogamous, but their very liberal custom is that, preparatory to marriage, potential partners are presented to each other naked, to ensure that each is entirely happy with the other before they make their binding commitment. 

After Sir Thomas More, many more Utopias were described. For instance, further ideal worlds were imagined in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1600), Johan Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and, later, in Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and William Morris’ News from Nowhere. These nations were, as often, vehicles for satirising our own less than perfect worlds as they were blueprints for a better society.

The first novel by Pierre Louys, Les Chansons de Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis, 1894) was in some limited degree a utopian story: he imagined an ideal classical Greek world in which same sex marriage was possible and people’s sexuality was of very little concern. He pursued this idea in Les Aventures du roi Pausole in 1900, in which he imagined a contemporary kingdom of Trypheme, somewhere towards the south of France. It was a pagan land, ruled benignly by King Pausole, although he imposed various odd ideas on the population. Young people went around naked most of the time; the king had a harem and imposed no restrictions on other people taking multiple spouses; sexuality once again was unrestricted and could be expressed by individuals however they wished. I think it’s fair to observe that the want of clothes in Trypheme- youths only tend to wear a hat or scarf on their heads and clogs on their feet in its mild climate- is probably more to do with the king (and others) being able to ogle young bodies than it is to do with any notions of equality or simplicity as might have been found in Sir Thomas More’s work. 

Nonetheless, when- in about 1911-1913- Louys composed L’Île aux dames, a description of an island Utopia, he took the ideas barely sketched in Bilitis and Pausole much further.

L’Île aux dames concerns the experiences of Fernande, a French woman, who finds herself deposited on the island after a ballooning accident. This means of arrival in the strange land is something Louys stole from Jules Verne, for that writer had used it previously in his novel of 1875 to take his characters to the Mysterious Island. In addition, he may well have been inspired to devise a utopia by the Marquis de Sade, whose Aline et Valcour (1795) explored a South Pacific island paradise called as Tamoé which is led by the philosopher-king Zamé and happiness and prosperity flourish amidst benevolent anarchy. 

Louys’ novel is fragmented and unfinished and was only published in 1988, long after the author’s death in 1925. The text presents itself in part as a historical and tourist guide to this imaginary territory, the ‘Isle of Women,’ which is located off the coast of Cape Verde. Since its discovery in 1623, the island has been totally dedicated to, and governed by, female sexuality; so, for example, the constitution prohibits “on pain of death, the kidnapping or rape of a woman or girl”. At the time of Fernande’s visit, the island is ruled by a 33-year-old queen and her “harem of lovers and mistresses.” Women are entitled to express and enjoy their sexuality entirely freely and (perhaps predictably for Louys) a large proportion of the female population prefer same-sex relationships. This is something for which the island’s economy caters lavishly, with lesbian brothels and cabarets, intimate hair dressers and sex toy makers. In fact, sex appears to be the sole foundation of the economy. Again, Louys being Louys, the queen was introduced to lesbian sex by her eldest daughter and all the royal princesses engage in regular orgies with their ladies in waiting.

In the book, Louys sets out the history, geography (with even a map of the triangular island), legislation, customs, fashions, literature, industries and entertainments of the island. It is a community of pleasures: people seem to have sex whenever and wherever they like- and with whomsoever they like. The text then follows the adventures of Fernande, as she is befriended by a local family, adapts (quickly) to local customs and discovers her own same-sex attraction.

As with his parody of etiquette manuals, the Handbook of Good Manners for Young Girls, Louys set out to challenge and subverted the prevailing social standards of the Catholic French bourgeoisie. The book is both an attack on the restrictions and hypocrisy of contemporary French society as it is postulation of an alternative. In fact, the Île aux dames is not much of a practical alternative to anything- as it stands- as beyond their complete sexual liberation, the population don’t seem to have achieved very much. It’s not a perfect society, certainly, in that individuals can starve and may have to offer sexual services to be able to eat- which even happens to Fernande towards the end of the book as we have it. She gains a prestigious place at court, but then falls out with the queen and is reduced to selling herself on the street.

Louys may have planned more and might have resolved Fernande’s problems, at least, but he set aside the manuscript and never returned to it. As ever, too, we should be cautious about reading too much into some of what Louys wrote, as he was always inclined to parody and exaggeration. Nevertheless, in Île aux dames we have an intriguing glimpse of an alternative world, one that offers exhilaration and excitement that wouldn’t be found in More’s severely rational and materialist Utopia, but one that has its own (very different) gaps, faults and monotonies.

Louys invented no dystopias, as such, although it may have been possible that the downsides of L’Ile aux dames would have been revealed had he completed the text. The author did, nonetheless, compose some dystopian scenes rather than entire countries. The royal court of King Gonzalve in L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve is highly arguably a depraved and malfunctioning environment, in which the king has created a situation that both facilitates his planned incest with his daughters and yet frustrates it in the most dysfunctional way. On an even smaller scale, the similar circumstances of the family in Trois filles et leur mere present to us a wholly depraved and unhealthy household. These are small scale examples of what an absence of normal restraints and principles might create.

Pierre Louys created imaginary worlds in which he could test out his social and moral ideas. These utopias might be lands faraway in the antique past, they might be distant islands or countries or they might be isolated communities in present-day France- Teresa’s self-contained household in Trois Filles or the boarding school of Toinon. In all cases, they were sealed off from our reality, allowing him to experiment. In this, Louys was not alone. Consider, for example, the gay artist Gaston Goor (1902-1977); he depicted boys and young men together but, given the time place and subject matter, he generally chose to relocate his fantasies to the classical world (where pederasty was an accepted institution), to boarding schools or to isolated islands. This, again, removed the controversial sexuality he portrayed to a safe distance and made it more acceptable.

For more on Louys, see my bibliography page.