A collection of seven mildly erotic "pastel" stories, based mostly on mythology, originally published in limited editions in Paris between 1893 and 1898. Pierre Louys retells these legends so beautifully that, under the spell of his relation, one almost loses sight of the extent to which their consummate literary craftsmanship reveals the master of literary technic no less than the imaginative artist. The pastels are not so sensational as some of the author's other works but, in a general sense, they are the most delicate and the most sympathetic of all his writings. Pierre Louys, pseudonym...

A bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarme among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louÿs' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The...