Pierre Louÿs
Personal Information
Description
Pierre Louÿs, pseudonym of Pierre Louis (born Dec. 10, 1870, Ghent, Belgium—died June 4, 1925, Paris, France), French novelist and poet whose merit and limitation were to express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection. Louÿs frequented Parnassian and Symbolist circles and was a friend of the composer Claude Debussy. He founded short-lived literary reviews, notably La Conque (1891). His Chansons de Bilitis (1894), prose poems about Sapphic love, purporting to be translations from the Greek, deceived even experts. Aphrodite (1896), a novel depicting courtesan life in ancient Alexandria, made him famous. His best novel is La Femme et le pantin (1898; Woman and Puppet), which is set in Spain. Louÿs’s popularity, which rested more on his eroticism than on purely aesthetic grounds, has faded. [Encyclopædia Britannica]
Books
Toinon
Young Antoinette, known as Toinon, is the precocious narrator of these memoirs from a select girl's boarding school. Toinon details the wild sexual experimentation that transpires nightly between herself, her seventeen co-boarders, and certain members of staff. This explicit hymn to lesbianism and sexual mania was among the final papers of Pierre Louys, the author famous for The She Devils.
Aphrodite (ancient manners)
This was "the only only complete English version extant" of a novel originally in French about a courtesan living in ancient Alexandria. The book is lavishly illustrated, but is sloppy in other ways. For instance, every time there is a full page illustration (and there are many) the page numbering skips, and the margins of the page are not evenly wide. This is the kind of book that you had to cut the pages with a knife before you could read it. You could call the story erotica, but it is no worse than The Decameron or Chaucer. It must have been pretty hot reading in 1906. The book has a page stating "This Edition on Large Paper is limited to 1000 copies of which this is No......" but nobody bothered to fill in the number, so I would guess that more than 1,000 of these were printed.
Pybrac
In turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs' Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louÿs' secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase 'I do not like to see ..., ' Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own evergrowing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he 'disliked' witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest, and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains collected here conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near hypnotic obsession.
Erotic Adventures of Toinon
Young Antoinette, known as Toinon, is the precocious narrator of these memoirs from a select girl's boarding school. Toinon details the wild sexual experimentation that transpires nightly between herself, her seventeen co-boarders, and certain members of staff. This explicit hymn to lesbianism and sexual mania was among the final papers of Pierre Louys, the author famous for The She Devils.