A short life of the author
Pierre Louÿs was the supreme aesthete of the French fin de siècle — a writer who devoted his talent to the celebration of pagan beauty and female sexuality with a classical erudition, a formal perfection, and a shameless sensuality that made him one of the most admired and most controversial literary figures of his generation. He was a friend of André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Claude Debussy (who set his poems to music in the Chansons de Bilitis), a hoaxer of genius who fooled the scholarly world with fabricated Greek poetry, and a writer whose best work achieved a synthesis of ancient and modern sensibility that few of his contemporaries could match — before addiction, illness, and creative paralysis destroyed him.
The Symbolist Circle
Pierre Félix Louis (he changed the spelling to Louÿs, with a diaeresis, for aesthetic reasons) was born in 1870 in Ghent, Belgium, to French parents. He was educated at the École Alsacienne in Paris, where he formed a lifelong friendship with André Gide, and at the Sorbonne, where he studied classical literature. He was handsome, charming, and precociously literary, and by his early twenties he was at the centre of the Symbolist movement — editing the literary magazine La Conque, frequenting the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé, and cultivating friendships with Verlaine, Heredia, and Valéry.
His personal life was as aesthetically curated as his literary work. He had affairs with numerous women — including the actress and courtesan Liane de Pougy and the soprano Emma Calvé — and his obsessive collection of erotic photographs, not published until long after his death, revealed a man whose sexual imagination was as elaborate and as meticulously documented as his literary one.
The Songs of Bilitis
Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894) was Louÿs’s most ingenious creation — a collection of 143 prose poems presented as translations from the work of Bilitis, a Greek poetess contemporary with Sappho on the island of Lesbos. Louÿs invented Bilitis entirely — her biography, her historical context, her poetic oeuvre — and presented the poems with scholarly apparatus so convincing that several academics initially accepted them as genuine. The hoax was a masterpiece of literary forgery, comparable to Macpherson’s Ossian, and the poems themselves — lush, sensual, explicitly depicting female desire and lesbian love — were beautiful enough to stand on their own merits when the deception was revealed.
Debussy composed his Trois Chansons de Bilitis (1897) using three of Louÿs’s poems, and later created incidental music for a staged presentation of the poems. The Songs of Bilitis became one of the defining texts of fin-de-siècle eroticism, and the name “Bilitis” was later adopted by the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights organisation in the United States (founded 1955).
Aphrodite
Aphrodite: Mœurs antiques (Aphrodite: Ancient Manners, 1896) was Louÿs’s most commercially successful work — a novel set in Ptolemaic Alexandria that depicted the world of courtesans, sculptors, philosophers, and temple prostitutes with a luxurious sensuality and a meticulous attention to archaeological detail that made it both scandalous and irresistible. The story centred on Chrysis, a courtesan who demands three impossible tasks from the sculptor Demetrios as the price of her love.
The novel sold 350,000 copies in its first year — an extraordinary figure for a literary novel — and was translated into dozens of languages. It was adapted for the opera stage, the ballet, and the cinema. Its success made Louÿs wealthy and famous, but it also set expectations that he could never again meet.
The Woman and the Puppet
La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898) was a darker, more psychologically acute work — the story of a middle-aged Spanish gentleman who is systematically humiliated and destroyed by a young woman who manipulates his desire with sadistic precision. The novel was adapted by Josef von Sternberg as The Devil Is a Woman (1935, starring Marlene Dietrich) and by Luis Buñuel as That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
Decline
After 1900, Louÿs’s creative productivity collapsed. He became addicted to opium and cocaine, his eyesight deteriorated, and he withdrew into an increasingly reclusive existence devoted to his photographic collections and to unfinished literary projects. He died in poverty in 1925, his reputation already in decline.
Collecting Louÿs
French first editions are the primary collecting targets. Les Chansons de Bilitis (Librairie de l’Art indépendant, 1894) and Aphrodite (Mercure de France, 1896) are the most sought-after. Illustrated editions — particularly those with engravings by various fin-de-siècle artists — are also collected. Louÿs’s erotic photograph collection, published in various editions since the 1990s, has attracted a separate collecting interest.