Pierre Louÿs

Pierre-Félix Louÿs (10 December 1870 – 4 June 1925) was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.

Each is master of himself, of his opinions, of his behaviour and of his actions, within the limits of inoffensiveness.

Quotes

Les Chansons de Bilitis: traduites du grec ("The Songs of Bilitis") (1894)

The Songs of Bilitis. Translated by Horace Manchester Brown. Privately printed for members of The Aldus Society, 1904

• Stripped of my clothes, naked, I climbed into a tree. My bare thighs in a close embrace pressed the smooth damp bark. My sandals trod upon the branches.
  Almost at the top, but still under the leaves in the shadow from the heat, I put myself astride of a projecting branch, my legs dangling in the air.
  The rain came, and cool drops fell upon me and ran over my skin. My hands were soiled with moss, and my toes were red with the juice of crushed flowers.
  I felt the life of the beautiful tree when the wind blew through its branches. Then I pressed my thighs together in an ecstasy, and laid my open lips against the hairy nape of a limb.
  • I. The Tree

• When he returned, I hid my face with my two hands. He said to me: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kissing?" — "Who has seen us? The night and the moon."
  And the stars and the first dawn. The moon looked at her face in the lake and has told it to the water under the willows. The water of the lake has told it to the oar.
  And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat to the fisher. Helas! Helas! if that were all! But the fisher has told it to a woman.
  The fisher has told it to a woman. My father and my mother, and my sisters, and all Hellas will know it.
  • XXXVI. Song ("When He Returned")

• He presses me so closely that he will crush me, poor little girl that I am. But when he is within me, I know nothing more in the world, and they might cut off my limbs without recalling me from my ecstasy.
  • XXXVIII. The Little House

• I will leave the bed as she has left it, unmade and rumpled, the covers wrinkled, in order that the imprint of her form may remain by the side of mine.
  Until to-morrow I will not go to the bath, I will not wear my clothing, and I will not comb my hair, for fear lest I efface one of her caresses.
  I will eat neither this morning nor this evening, and upon my lips I will put neither rouge nor powder, in order that her kisses may remain.
  I will leave the shades closed, and I will not open the door, for fear lest the memory she has left behind should fly away on the wind.
  • LIV. The Past That Still Lives

• Mother inexhaustible, incorruptible, creatrix, first-born, self-conceived, self-created, enjoyed of thyself alone and issue of thyself, Astarte!
  Oh, perpetually fecund, oh, virgin and nurse of all, chaste and lascivious one, pure and wanton, ineffable, nocturnal, soft, breather of fire, foam of the sea!
  Thou who accordest thy grace in secret, thou who unitest, thou who lovest, thou who fillest the unending races of savage beasts with furious desire, and joinest the sexes in the forests!
  Oh, Astarte irresistible, hear me ; take me, possess me, oh. Moon, and thirteen times each year draw from my privities the libation of my blood.
  • XCII. Hymn to the Astarte

Aphrodite: mœurs antiques ("Aphrodite: ancient morals") (1896)

Ancient Manners: Complete and Integral Translation Into English. Paris: Privately printed, n.d.

• She lay upon her bosom, with her elbows in front of her, her legs wide apart and her cheek resting on her hand, pricking, with a long golden pin, small symmetrical holes in a pillow of green linen.
  Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered bed ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.
  The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.
  This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird’s wing, supple, uncountable, full of life and warmth. It covered half her back, flowed under her naked belly, glittered under her knees in thick, curling clusters. The young woman was enwrapped in this precious fleece. It glinted with a russet sheen, almost metallic, and had procured her the name of Chrysis, given her by the courtesans of Alexandria.
  It was not the sleek hair of the court-woman from Syria, or the dyed hair of the Asiatics, or the black and brown hair of the daughters of Egypt. It was the hair of an Aryan race, the Galilæans across the sands.
  • Incipit, Book I, Chapter I. Chrysis

• “At Ephesos, in our country, when two virgins of nubile age like Rhodis and me love one another, the law allows them to be united in marriage. They both go to the temple of Athena and sacrifice their double girdle; thence to the sanctuary of Iphinoë, where they offer a lock of their hair, interwined; and finally to the peristyle of Dionysios, where the more male of the two receives a little knife of sharp-edged gold, and a white linen cloth to stanch the blood. In the evening, the “fiancee” is conducted to her new home in a flowered chariot between her husband and the paranymph, escorted by torch-bearers and flute-girls. And thenceforth they have the rights of married people; they may adopt little girls and associate them in their intimate life. They are respected. They have a family. That is the dream of Rhodis. But it is not the custom here.”
  • On Lesbianism, Book I, Chapter VII. Chrysis’s Hair

• If, in the course of their stray amours, they conceived a son, he was brought up in the temple-enclosure in the contemplation of the perfect form and in the service of its divinity. If they were brought to bed of a daughter, the child was consecrated to the goddess.
  On the first day of its life, they celebrated its symbolic marriage with the son of Dionysos, and the Hierophant deflowered it herself with a little golden knife; for virginity is displeasing to Aphrodite. Later on, the little girl entered the Didascalion, a great monumental school situated behind the temple, and where the theory and practice of all the erotic arts were taught in seven stages: the use of the eyes, the embrace, the motions of the body, the secrets of the bite, of the kiss, and of glottism.
  • The Rites of Aphrodite, Book II, Chapter I. The Gardens of the Goddess

• “From the point of view of love, woman is a perfect instrument. From head to foot she is constructed, solely, marvellously, for love. She alone knows how to love. She alone knows how to be loved. Consequently, if a couple of lovers is composed of two women, it is perfect; if there is only one woman, it is only half as good; if there is no woman at all, it is purely idiotic. That is all I have to say.”
  • Naucrates on Women, Book II, Chapter V. The Invitation

• Human love is to be distinguished from the rut of animals only by two divine functions: the caress and the kiss.
  • Naucrates on Love, Book II, Chapter V. The Invitation

Les Aventures du roi Pausole ("The Adventures of King Pausole") (1900)

The Adventures of King Pausole. Translated by Charles Hope Lumley. New York: Privately printed for William Godwin, Inc., 1933

King Pausole dispensed justice from under a cherry tree.

• King Pausole dispensed justice from under a cherry tree, for, he was wont to say, that tree gives just as much shade as any other, and has the advantage over the traditional oak that in the summer it bears delightful fruit.
  • Book I, Chapter I. How King Pausole encountered the vicissitudes of life for the first time

• Pausole could not walk, seat himself nor even raise his head without touching a naked sleeper. A suspended net united two and pressed one against the other. Those who were troubled by the heat slept in the shallow pool, and with their heads on the marble border, stretched their legs under the water as far as the central mermaid’s figure: pistil of an open tulip formed by their radiant bodies.
  • Book I, Chapter IV. How King Pausole returned to the Palace and what he considered should be done about it

• An enormous fig tree let fall its flat leaves and its lilac coloured fruit like a carpet over the balustrade. On the left the park was massed with its magnolias which had already lost their flowers, its shuddering eucalyptus, its squat Japanese palms, its magnificent lunar sago trees. A hedge of aloes hemmed in the dark garden and the plain stretched beyond, to the Stars.
  • Book I, Chapter VI. How Diane à la Houppe and King Pausole saw someone enter whom they were not expecting

• From the mouth of a satyr with extravagant ears, the water fell into a natural basin of red earth and green vegetation where oleanders had taken root in compact masses. It was by no means the musty and slimy basin of our gardens where the useless spring soaks an earth already soft with rain. It was a birth of flowers in the purple soil of the Midi, a fountain of strength, a creative urn whence life streamed in verdant motion, and the old satyr, son of Pan, watched the youth of the woods fall eternally from his lips.
  Above the grotesque horned head which the fair Aline took to be the devil, two marble nymphs embraced, leaning towards the dark basin. At the end of each winter, the almond tree covered them with its little eglantines. In the summer they took on all the flesh tints under the sun. At night they became goddesses.
  • Book II, Chapter III. How the Mirror of the Nymphs became that of the young girls

• “Let me resume,” said M. Lebirbe. “In fighting the domestic licence, in bringing discredit on secret meeting places and on vile old men who disparage nudity only to find it less tame between the corset and the black stocking, we are making great efforts towards the antique and pure nude, we favour life in daylight, freedom of morals, example and direct teaching of restraint — in a word, the expansion of public voluptuousness in the country of Tryphemia.” [...]
  Then accentuating his first words by Striking the air with his fist, Pausole said slowly:
  “Sir, man demands to be left alone. Each is master of himself, of his opinions, of his behaviour and of his actions, within the limits of inoffensiveness. The citizens of Europe are tired of feeling at every moment the hand of authority on their shoulder, an authority which is made unbearable by being omnipresent. They still tolerate the fact that the law speaks to them in the name of public interest, but when it begins to interfere with the individual in spite of or against his wishes, when it directs his private life, his marriage, divorce, last wishes, reading, performances, games and costume, the individual has the right to ask the law why it has poked its nose into his affairs without having been invited. ”
  “Sire...”
  “Never will I place my subjects in the position of being able to level such a reproach against me. I give them advice, it is my duty. Some do not follow it, it is their right. And so long as one of them does not put out his hand to steal a purse, or to give a rap on the nose, I do not have to interfere in the life of a free citizen. Your work is good, Monsieur Lebirbe; let it spread and be imposed, but don’t expect me to lend you police to throw into irons those who do not think as we.”
  • Book III, Chapter VI. Wherein M. Lebirbe and King Pausole find with surprise that they are not in agreement on every point

Trois Filles de leur mère ("Three Daughters of their Mother") (1926)

Three Naughty French Novels. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club [Grove Press], 2001

• “... after you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.”
  • Chapter IV

Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l'usage des maisons d'éducation (1927)

• Nous avons jugé inutile d'expliquer les mots: con, fente, moniche, motte, pine, queue, bitte, couille, foutre (verbe), foutre (subst.), bander, branler, sucer, lécher, pomper, baiser, piner, enfiler, enconner, enculer, décharger, godmiché, gougnotte, gousse, soixante-neuf, minette, mimi, putain, bordel. Ces mots-là sont familiers à toutes les petites filles.
• We have considered it useless to explain the words: cunt, slit, fanny, mound, cock, tail, bollock, testicle, cum (verb), cum (noun), erection, masturbate, suck, lick, pump, kiss, fellate, screw, fuck, ass-fuck, ejaculate, dildo, lesbian, dyke, sixty-nine, cunnilingus, cute, whore, brothel. These words are familiar to all little girls.
  • Glossary