Twilight of the Nymphs, The

A collection of seven mildly erotic "pastel" stories, based mostly on mythology, originally published in limited editions in Paris between 1893 and 1898. Pierre Louÿs 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 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).