Pierre Louÿs, pseudonym of Pierre Louis (1870-1925), was a French novelist and poet who expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection. Louÿs frequented Parnassian and Symbolist circles and was a friend of the composer Claude Debussy. He founded various literary reviews, notably La Conque in 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 and it became the best-selling work by any living French writer (350,000 copies).… (more)