Pierre Louÿs

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 …