Pierre Louÿs

1870–1925

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]

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