Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs (born 10 December 1870 in Ghent, died 4 June 1925 in Paris) was a poet and writer born in Belgium who spent almost all of his working life in France and wrote in French. He moved between the Parnassian and Symbolist schools and is remembered above all for erotic writing built on classical themes and lesbian subjects. The French state later honoured him as a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his place in French literature.

Born Pierre Félix Louis, he was educated at the École Alsacienne in Paris, where he befriended the future Nobel laureate André Gide. From 1890 he began spelling his surname "Louÿs" and pronouncing the final S, a choice that reflected his enthusiasm for ancient Greek culture. He started writing erotic texts around the age of eighteen. In the 1890s he became a friend of Oscar Wilde, who dedicated the French edition of Salomé to him. He also had a long-term romantic relationship with the writer Marie de Régnier.

In 1891 he helped launch the review La Conque, which published Gide, Mallarmé, Valéry and Verlaine among others. His breakthrough came in 1894 with The Songs of Bilitis, a set of prose poems with strong lesbian themes that he presented as the translated verses of a courtesan from ancient Greece. The hoax was soon exposed, but the book was admired for its sensuality and for its sympathetic view of sexuality between women. Claude Debussy set several of the poems to music, and decades later the name of the work gave one of America's first lesbian organizations its title.

His first novel, Aphrodite, appeared in 1896 and describes courtesan life in Alexandria; it sold very widely for its time. He later wrote libertine works such as The Adventures of King Pausole and Pervigilium Mortis, and a daring parody that appeared anonymously and after his death. In 1919 he proposed, somewhat unconventionally, that Corneille had in fact written the plays attributed to Molière. His legacy lies in his pursuit of a pagan sensuality shaped by strict formal care, and in the influence his texts had on music, illustration and debates about sexual diversity.