A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier - A Booktryst Golden Oldie

by Stephen J. Gertz

BARBIER, Georges. Le Grand Décolletage.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

This past Saturday, alone and at loose ends, I called Lisette. She was, as ever, loose, so we made plans for the evening, a night on the town in Paris and pleasure.

I stopped by to pick her up. An hour later, she was still involved with her Grand Turning, transforming herself into a siren and I was duly alarmed. I just stood there, in awe. All I could think was, Aw, if there is a God, I’m under that dress by midnight..

BARBIER, Georges. La gourmandise.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

We stopped to sup. We had the soup. There was a fly in it. Performing a languid tarantella, as our waiter informed us when we asked what it was doing there, the fly, apparently, in the midst of an inter-insect identity crisis. Afterward, Jocelyn, Lisette’s special friend, stopped at our table to say hello and comment upon Lisette’s gown, which she had, at the last minute before leaving home, put on instead of the wearable, floral patterned yurt I’d planned on being inside of under cover of darkness and Lisette.

She asked about our meal. “It was fly,” we said, “super-fly.”

“And so are you, Lisette,” Jocelyn said. I looked into Lisette’s  eyes and saw what Jocelyn was talking about, a thousand tiny lenses looking back at me as if I was a granule of refined sugar. Sweet night ahead!

We asked Jocelyn to join us; we desperately wanted to stick together. But Jocelyn insisted that we remain single so that the three of us could continue into the evening without her feeling like a third wheel.

BARBIER, Georges. La Danse.
Modes et manièrs d'aujourd'hui
Paris: Maquet, 1914.

We wheeled over to Danse Macabre, the popular night-spot. A troglodyte manned the velvet rope. He refused us entry but I slipped him a mickey and he let us in before losing consciousness. “Always tip the bouncer,” I told the ladies as his head bounced on the sidewalk. We breezed in.

Lisette excused herself, and when she returned she was wearing yet another gown. I, during the interim, grew a mustache and put some eye shadow on. While Lisette and I  danced, Jocelyn drank the joy-juice flowing from the Chinese God’s phallic fountain into her champagne coupe full of cherries. Jubilee, my friend, a real jubilee it was.

You know me, Al. We danced until the cows came home. When they arrived it became too crowded  so we ditched the bovine for divine and further delights.

BARBIER, Georges. Le goût des laques (Taste of Lacquers).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Maynal, 1924

Don’t ask me why but Lisette and Jocelyn had a  yen for a taste of lacquers so we stopped at a lacquer store, picked up a bottle and settled in a Japanese park comprised of a few vivid screen panels, just off the Champs-Élysée. They - once again! - changed their clothes, and the two of them huffed lacquer fumes while I stood aside and watched them get giddily shellacked. Jocelyn wandered off, we knew not where, led by the hallucinations she was now following in a trance.

BARBIER, Georges. Le Soir.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1926

“If you promise not to change your gown again I’ll take you to a palace of infernal pleasures,” I begged Lisette, now garbed as a goddess.

BARBIER, Georges. Oui!
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1921

“Oui!” she replied, but not before changing her outfit once more. I swear, she had a walk-in closet in her purse. She wasn’t a clothes horse; she was a clothes whale and craved fresh clothing, a lot of it, as if it were krill. A moment later, two birds shat on my spats. Auspicious omen! Time to evacuate and get this party started. So we both used the bathroom and then went on our way. Pops Marchande was waiting for us.

BARBIER, Georges. La Paresse (Laziness)
Falbalas et Fanfreluches.
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

You know me, Al, most parties I wind up checking out the books in the library. So, I go into the library and, yikes!, there’s Lisette draped over pillows on the floor, to all appearances in a state of post-coital bliss,  lazily smoking a cigarette as if she had been doing it all her life instead of starting just fifteen minutes before when she donned a smoking pantsuit and was inspired by it to begin, despite the Surgeon-General's warning medallion on the front of the garment. Jocelyn, who had, apparently, followed her favorite hallucination, was at her side, spent, and lost in ecstatic reverie. 

That being the reason we attended Pops Marchande’s party in the first place, the three of us glided into the den.

BARBIER, Georges. Chez la Marchande de Pavols (House of the Poppy Merchant).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

There was Pops Marchande, holding an opium tray and pipe, awaiting us. And sprawled on the floor and across pillows were five women in dishabille, each a dish and highly dishable. You know me, Al. When I bang the gong, I’m gone. What happened next, I have no idea. But I have a vague recollection of a bunch of women in the throes of opium-soaked rut, running their tongues all over me and each other, kisses from all directions on all parts, caresses that began and never stopped, and the sense that we were all drifting upon a cloud of silk that soothed as we floated upon a zephyr.

It was nice to see Lisette without any clothes on for a change. While it lasted.
 

BARBIER, Georges. Au Revoir.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

Dawn broke and it was time for us to get dressed and leave.  Lisette, Jocelyn, and I said our goodbyes, and Ho Chi Minh, an Indo-Chinese dishwasher in Paris and part-time chauffeur working for Pops Marchande, drove the two of us back home.

BARBIER, Georges. Voici des ailes! (Here are my wings!).
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1925

We were both still rather dreamy from opium. It was a nightmare for me, however, when gum-on-my-shoe Jocelyn appeared out of nowhere; there was no scraping this woman off. "Here are my wings," the flapper said to Lisette, who had not only changed into yet another gown but had dyed her hair blonde before bedtime.

You know me, Al. I'll fight any joe who tries to horn in on my jane. But this Jocelyn! Geesh! She had bewitched Lisette and there was nothing I could do about it. They flew into the bedroom, the winged-spider carrying her prey aloft. The fly in the soup at supper tried to warn me but I wasn't listening...

I slept on the couch.

Gay Paree. Don't ask, don't tell. You didn't, I did. Sorry.

I'm joining the Foreign Legion.

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Apologies to Georges Barbier and Ring Lardner.

Booktryst  revisits Georges Barbier and his exquisite illustrations in pochoir in In Paris with Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier.
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Originally appeared November 15, 2010.
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Father of Graphic Design: Dwiggins in Living Color

by Alastair Johnston

Bill Dwiggins (1880–1956), type designer, book designer, typographer, calligrapher, writer, artist & puppeteer is famously the first American to call himself a graphic designer. Philip Hofer writing in The Dolphin, 1935, called him “America’s only truly modern typographer, and by far her outstanding book decorator and calligrapher.” Dwiggins was not a traditional fine press person, having outgrown the Arts & Crafts furrow of his mentor, Fred Goudy, soon after Goudy left the village of Hingham, Mass, for New York in 1905. Dwiggins, who came from Martinsville, Ohio, decided to stay and work as an advertising designer & typographer for Houghton-Mifflin and the Merrymount Press of Boston. 

There’s a great anecdote where Goudy runs into D. B. Updike of the Merrymount Press at a Society of Printers dinner, and says, "Why don’t you hire me, after all I taught Dwiggins everything he knows." Updike replies, "That’s odd because I admire his work whereas yours doesn’t impress me at all..."

Another anecdote I am fond of is that a doctor told WAD [William Addison Dwiggins, a.k.a. Will, Bill, WAD, or Dwig], who was diabetic, that he was heading for a nervous breakdown and he should get out of the advertising rat race before it killed him. At that point he decided to devote his life to making marionettes and entertaining the local children with puppet shows. He carved and clothed the marionettes, wrote and produced a play, but then he needed a poster, tickets and other ephemera to promote it, so was soon back in the world of graphic design. And it was this work that prompted Alfred Knopf to ask him to take on a book design (Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, 1926, was his first job for Knopf).

To digress a moment: In my wasted youth I was inclined to make “music” with others who shared my passion for noisy self-expression. I met a guy named Ralph who built guitars and who told me he came from Hingham. I mentioned Dwiggins and his puppet shows and Ralph recalled the old white-haired man and told me he had attended some of the performances! I was astounded. You didn’t keep any tickets did you?!!

Dwiggins’ book designs are unmistakable. You can spot them from 12 feet away in a dim and dusty used bookstore. He would break words on the spine to fit a design, and frame them with bold abstractions. He is one designer whose dust-jackets are fantastic but you still want to take them off to see what the case stamping looks like with his wild, sometimes seemingly erratic, calligraphy.

As a “black-&-white-smith,” Dwiggins made his own tools, and among them were stencils. He employed them in his type design. He cut many small glyphs, either geometric or organic forms which could be multiplied for dramatic effect, and he used these small elements to visualize and build up decorative matter such as borders, headpieces and endpaper patterns. Cut with a knife, they were more uniform than pen & ink and sharper than brushwork (and harmonized better with the sharp contours of printed letterforms). In his book Paraphs (NY: Knopf, 1928) these geometric ornaments appear as sleek art deco ikebana.

When I decided to write about Dwiggins’ pochoir (or stencil-coloring) today the first place I looked was the bibliography The Books of WAD published by Dwight Agner (Baton Rouge: Press of the Night Owl, 1974), whose descriptions of books are skimpy and often vague. The first mention of pochoir comes under H. G. Wells’ Time Machine (NY: Random House, 1931, above). Agner says “Stencil style color illustrations.” 1200 copies were printed. How likely is it that the images were actually stenciled? Not very. These, like the images in Marco Polo (NY: Leo Hart, 1933) or Gargantua and Pantagruel (NY: Limited Editions Club, 1936), were printed from line blocks in spot color. Dwiggins agreed with Wells’ vision of a machine-dominated future and felt we needed to master technology in order to avoid becoming machines ourselves. Clearly with The Time Machine he was interested in realizing the vision of a luxuriously printed trade book. Remember this was during the depression: there was no market for livres de luxe, though artists like F.-L. Schmied in Paris bravely carried on.

Dwiggins played as hard as he worked: another reason to venerate him. In 1919 he had created the Society of Calligraphers, partly for self-promotion, and to this end he invented an alter ego, Hermann Püterschein (he was trying to polish an old pewter tankard he had bought and exclaimed, “I can’t make the damn pewter shine!” thus giving birth to the Püterschein family), a learned doctor who wrote profound things on the still-unheralded art of calligraphy. In order to boost the ranks he inducted other designers, typographers and printers, sending them a certificate of membership. The heading is stenciled and the seal is embossed, also from Dwiggins’ design. Curiously when Dwiggins was awarded the gold medal of the AIGA in 1929 he was virulently attacked in the press — by his former ally Püterschein!

The “Graphic Response to Verbal Stimuli” series was made using pochoir (reproduced below in The Dolphin, 1935). Dwiggins told Paul Hollister, “You take a cork out of the top of your head, and you drop in a word like La Paz, or Congo, or Sinbad. One word at a time. If it’s the name of a place it need not be a place you know ... Then put in a couple of cocktails and some black coffee, and put the cork back in tight, and jump up and down for two or three days and then the word will come out of your fingers onto the paper. Then you give the result — picture or pattern, or whatever it is — a high-sounding caption like ‘Graphic Response to Verbal Stimulus: La Paz.’ That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t mean a thing but it’s a lot of fun.”

Dwiggins used celluloid stencils (which didn’t warp or shrink like mylar and were transparent so he could register multiple colors) and, once he had created a design, he would make separate prints of each color area to be photographed in register and given to the engraver. Dwiggins himself says his first effort at stencil illustration was for One More Spring by Robert Nathan (Stamford: The Overbrook Press, 1935). 750 copies were created but again, examination of this delightful book (below) shows that blocks were made from his artwork to expedite publication.

He planned pochoir art for other books but seemingly always ended up going with zinc cuts, apart from the small-run books from his home studio in Hingham, and The Treasure in the Forest, (130 copies), one of his major artistic achievements.

The Treasure in the Forest, by H. G. Wells (New York: Press of the Wooly Whale, 1936), was designed by Mwano Masassi (a pseudonym of Dwiggins taken from the black slave in one of his puppet plays, see top of page). Handset Caslon type was used and Dwiggins created headbands (which he called “paraphs” rejecting the high-falutin’ French name en-têtes) from stencil patterns. The darkness of the 18th-century looking page frame is in marked contrast to the delicacy of the pastel images.

WAD wrote to Knopf about his color theories because Knopf’s staff didn’t approve of his palette: “I like Far East color combinations; a chutney-sauce effect with lots of pepper and mustard and spices, odd harmonies that make you sit up. I think the Chinese were the greatest color manipulators, and after them the Persians of the miniatures.” When he adds “I like black as part of a color scheme,” we understand his taste for non-keyline imagery, a very appealing facet of his artwork.

The small books Dwiggins produced at his private press Püterschein-Hingham have a wonderful mix of experimental type, page layout and illustration. The War against Waak (1948) shows, in the writing, his admiration for his contemporary, Lord Dunsany. The colors chosen for the illustrations reflect his interest in “Chinese” coloring — even the boats in “The Battle opposite Zond” (above) look Chinese. The book is set in Bulmer type and has large margins (a feature of his earlier works such as Layout in Advertising and Marco Polo); even so he has turned one of the images sideways — and run the caption vertically so you don’t miss that — perhaps as a comment on the awkwardness of landscape pictures in a vertical format. There is room for the image to have run the right way, so he is playing with our expectations of what a book looks like and giving us a perfect abstraction when we first view the picture vertically.

Many designers emulated Goudy, Bruce Rogers or Rockwell Kent, but no one could come near Dwiggins for his liberated approach to design, his creativity and colorful exuberance.

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Jazz Age High Society In Paris Tears Up The Dance Floor

By Stephen J. Gertz

Front wrapper.

Published in 1927, White Bottoms by SEM (Georges Goursat) is considered by many to be the most decorative,  charming and electric work illustrating the joy and excess of the Jazz Age.; the title humorousy refers to the Black Bottom, the dance craze that overtook the Charleston as the era's trademark leg-play.

The figures almost dance off the plates and into your lap to le jazz hot you can almost hear from the cats laying out wild rhythms and frenzied riffs. Everyone cuts loose. The energy is palpable.

This is Parisian high society of Le Belle Epoch grown-up and co-opting the flaming youth culture of the Roaring Twenties before their own flame dies down and out. High society is slumming in safety here, embracing the thrills without the danger,  the highly animated last gasp of forty-to-fifty-somethings, many of whom have gotten a bit thick around the middle. Matrons throw themselves into it with abandon while older gentlemen rev-up what's left of their engines in the company of young dolls or women of a certain age from the neck up trying to hold their own from the waist down. Everybody is having a great time.

Georges Goursat was born into comfortable circumstances. When he turned twenty-one he came into an inheritance that allowed him to indulge his youth. He could have been a wastrel but he had a natural gift as a caricaturist and worked to develop it.

He signed his first self-published albums, issued in the late 1880s, as SEM, reportedly in homage to CHAM, the 19th century French caricaturist born Amédée de Noé. During the 1890s, while living in Bordeaux, he began to contribute caricatures to magazines, and was influenced by graphic artist Leonetto Cappiello.

At the same time, while visiting Paris, he designed posters that were printed by the studio of master poster designer, Jules Chéret.

He moved to Paris in 1900 and entered its high society as a monied aficionado of the sport of kings. Firmly in the saddle of the horsey-set, Goursat, just three months after his Parisian debut, self-published Le Turf, featuring many of the city's socialites. It was a smash and its success brought him instant celebrity. Over the next thirteen years he self-published ten other albums caricaturing the Parisian upper-class.

The war years saw a different SEM. He was a war correspondent and issued two albums of war sketches, images far afield of his previous work.

The post-war years saw a return to his former style, his first album of the new era, Le Grande Monde à l'envers (High Society Upside-Down), published in 1919.

In his sixties during the 'Twenties he self-published Le Nouveau Monde (The New World), caricatures in three volumes. He was at this point an observer rather than participant in the devil-may-care culture that had swept Europe and America after World War I. In 1923 he became an officer in the Légion d'honneur.

By the time White Bottoms appeared toward the end of the decade he was tired; it was his last burst of energy. The financial crisis of 1929 impoverished him. He had a heart attack,  and later died in 1934.

Note Josephine Baker at lower left.

White Bottoms remains the most pointed and illustrative depiction (and certainly the most gently  humorous), of the aging Parisian upper-class of the era as it frantically pursues pleasure while it still can. It is, in retrospect, a fraught record of the last days of full sun in Paris before the cold eclipse of the 'Thirties darkened spirits,  a depressing crash after a decade-long cocaine-like binge.

OCLC records only two complete copies in institutional holdings worldwide.  It is of the utmost rarity compete with all of its forty-three pochoir plates present. Sets were very soon, alas, routinely broken-up to individually sell the images; incomplete copies are the norm, if you can find them. No copies in any state of completeness have come to auction within the last thirty-six years, per ABPC.

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SEM (pseud. of Georges Goursat 1863-1934). White Bottoms. Paris: n.p. [by the aritist], 1927. First edition. Folio (20 x 13 in; 51 x 33 cm). Forty-three plates in pochoir, loose in portfolio as issued. Illustrated wrappers.

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All images, except that of the wrapper, courtesy of Shapero Rare Books, currently offering the eight plates seen here from the album (excluding the upper wrapper).

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The Most Celebrated French Art Deco Illustrated Book of All

by Stephen J. Gertz

The original artist's mock-up for Tabubu, a novel, published in 1932, by Rosny aîné, and  considered to be one of the most, if not the most, refined and distinguished illustrated books of the French Art Deco era, has come to market.

Artist Maurice Lalau (1881-1961) began work on Tabubu in March 1928 and finished in July, 1932. Tabubu, as stunning an illustrated book as you will ever see, is characterized by page layouts of extraordinary virtuosity. The seventy-one illustrations were drawn by Lalau in shades of gray, brown, sand, pink and beige, or half-shades of blue, sometimes mottled, powdered gold or argent, with some areas highlighted with gold leaf and palladium.

The leaves of this extraordinary maquette present multiple images, occasionally variant versions. Drawings, layers, with varying degrees of goache, offer an unparalleled glimpse into the heart of the creative process of the artist. These works allow us to follow his instincts, his hesitations and his final choices. The artist is at work, and we can watch as if looking over his shoulder.

A student of Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constan, illustrator, cartoonist, and painter Maurice Lalau illustrated editions of Tristan and Iseult (1909), Anatole France's Le Miracle de la Pie (1921); Flaubert's The Legend of Saint Julien (1927); Reade's Cloister and the Hearth (1903); Corthis' Le Printemps sous l'Orage (1934); Mary's La Loge de Feuillage (1928); Agraives' La cité des stables (1935); Daudet's Le bonheur d'etre riche (1920); Paul Hervieu's Le petit duc (1910); etc. He was a member of the artistic and literary society The Cornet, founded 1896.

For the finished book, Lalau's illustrations were executed in pochoir,  a form of coloring pictures using stencils that dates to a thousand years ago in China.  It was introduced into commercial publishing in France in the late 1800s, and there it had its most exquisite expression.  The pochoir process would use from 20 to 250 different stencils, one for each color, and the result was a vibrancy with almost a three-dimensional effect. The colors pop off the page.

Tabubu's typographer (please repeat 3x, fast), Marthe Fequet, showed innovative layout and design, strongly influenced by François-Louis Schmied (1873-1941). After World War II she worked extensively with Pierre Lecuire, producing beautiful livres d'artistes.

"Rosny aîné " is the pseudonym of Joseph Boex (1856-1940), a Belgian living in France who wrote with his younger brother under the pseudonym J.H.Rosny until 1909, when the team split up. As Rosny aîné (Rosny the elder), Joseph Boex went on to rival Jules Verne as France's lord of science fiction. His masterpiece is The Navigators of Infinity (1925), an adventure on Mars; within he coined the word "astronaut."

Boex also wrote five novels with a prehistoric setting, each using modern drama and strong, believable characters to illuminate early man's existence. And then there's Tabubu, his novel set in ancient Egypt. Thank King Tut, whose discovery by Howard Carter in 1922 led to a renewed interest and international mania for all things Old Egyptian, a fashion that remained strong throughout the decade and for many years afterward.

In 1897, Joseph Boex was named to the French Légion d'honneur and in 1903 was named to the first jury of the Prix Goncourt along with his brother. Rosny aîné remained involved with the Académie Goncourt and in 1926 became its president. He died in Paris in 1940.

The novel is forgettable. The art by Maurice Lalau is not. This maquette for Tabubu is a treasure. It is being offered by Librairie Laurent Coulet for $35,500. The first edition is highly desirable and scarce. A fine copy recently sold for $16,385.

No, lest you've been thinking what I was thinking, Tabubu, despite the King Tut connection, is not the heartbreaking story of an ancient Egyptian tyke with a forbidden ow-y.

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The finished product:

LALAU, Maurice (illustr.) ROSNY Aîné. Tabubu. Roman égyptien. Paris: Jules Meynial, 1932. First edition,  limited to 110 copies on vélin de Madagascar. Octavo. 112, (6) pp. Pochoir colored title page, frontispiece and ten full page pochoir plates, chapter titles, decorative head- tailpieces, and text figures,  in shades of pink, beige, gray, brown, sand or half-shades of blue, sometimes mottled with powdered gold, some areas highlighted with gold leaf; a total of seventy-one illustrations. Text printed in brown and red. Loose as  issued in the publisher's decorative printed wrappers with glassine dust jacket.

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Images courtesy of Librairie Laurent Coulet, with our thanks.
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A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier

by Stephen J. Gertz

BARBIER, Georges. Le Grand Décolletage.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

This past Saturday, alone and at loose ends, I called Lisette. She was, as ever, loose, so we made plans for the evening, a night on the town in Paris and pleasure.

I stopped by to pick her up. An hour later, she was still involved with her Grand Turning, transforming herself into a siren and I was duly alarmed. I just stood there, in awe. All I could think was, Aw, if there is a God, I’m under that dress by midnight..

BARBIER, Georges. La gourmandise.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

We stopped to sup. We had the soup. There was a fly in it. Performing a languid tarantella, as our waiter informed us after we asked what it was doing there, the fly, apparently, was in the midst of an inter-insect identity crisis. Afterward, Jocelyn, Lisette’s special friend, stopped at our table to say hello and comment upon Lisette’s gown, which she had, at the last minute before leaving home, put on instead of the wearable, floral patterned yurt I’d planned on being inside of under cover of darkness and Lisette.

She asked about our meal. “It was fly,” we said, “super-fly.”

“And so are you, Lisette,” Jocelyn said. I looked into Lisette’s  eyes and saw what Jocelyn was talking about, a thousand tiny lenses looking back at me as if I was a granule of refined sugar. Sweet night ahead!

We asked Jocelyn to join us; we desperately wanted to stick together. But Jocelyn insisted that we remain single so that the three of us could continue into the evening without her feeling like a third wheel.

BARBIER, Georges. La Danse.
Modes et manièrs d'aujourd'hui
Paris: Maquet, 1914.

We wheeled over to Danse Macabre, the popular night-spot. A troglodyte manned the velvet rope. He refused us entry but I slipped him a mickey and he let us in before losing consciousness. “Always tip the bouncer,” I told the ladies as his head bounced on the sidewalk. We breezed in.

Lisette excused herself, and when she returned she was wearing yet another gown. I, during the interim, grew a mustache and put some eye shadow on. While Lisette and I  danced, Jocelyn drank the joy-juice flowing from the Chinese God’s phallic fountain into her champagne coupe full of cherries. Jubilee, my friend, a real jubilee it was.

You know me, Al. We danced until the cows came home. When they arrived it became too crowded  so we ditched the bovine for divine and further delights.

BARBIER, Georges. Le goût des laques (Taste of Lacquers).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Maynal, 1924

Don’t ask me why but Lisette and Jocelyn had a  yen for a taste of lacquers so we stopped at a lacquer store, picked up a bottle and settled in a Japanese park comprised of a few vivid screen panels, just off the Champs-Élysée. They - once again! - changed their clothes, and the two of them huffed lacquer fumes while I stood aside and watched them get giddily shellacked. Jocelyn wandered off, we knew not where, led by the hallucinations she was now following in a trance.

BARBIER, Georges. Le Soir.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1926

“If you promise not to change your gown again I’ll take you to a palace of infernal pleasures,” I begged Lisette, now garbed as a goddess.

BARBIER, Georges. Oui!
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1921

“Oui!” she replied, but not before changing her outfit once more. I swear, she had a walk-in closet in her purse. She wasn’t a clothes horse; she was a clothes whale and craved fresh clothing, a lot of it, as if it were krill. A moment later, two birds shat on my spats. Auspicious omen! Time to evacuate and get this party started. So we both used the bathroom and then went on our way. Pops Marchande was waiting for us.

BARBIER, Georges. La Paresse (Laziness)
Falbalas et Fanfreluches.
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

You know me, Al, most parties I wind up checking out the books in the library. So, I go into the library and, yikes!, there’s Lisette draped over pillows on the floor, to all appearances in a state of post-coital bliss,  lazily smoking a cigarette as if she had been doing it all her life instead of starting just fifteen minutes before when she donned a smoking pantsuit and was inspired by it to begin, despite the Surgeon-General's warning medallion on the front of the garment. Jocelyn, who had, apparently, followed her favorite hallucination, was at her side, spent, and lost in ecstatic reverie. 

That being the reason we attended Pops Marchande’s party in the first place, the three of us glided into the den.

BARBIER, Georges. Chez la Marchande de Pavols (House of the Poppy Merchant).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

There was Pops Marchande, holding an opium tray and pipe, awaiting us. And sprawled on the floor and across pillows were five women in dishabille, each a dish and highly dishable. You know me, Al. When I bang the gong, I’m gone. What happened next, I have no idea. But I have a vague recollection of a bunch of women in the throes of opium-soaked rut, running their tongues all over me and each other, kisses from all directions on all parts, caresses that began and never stopped, and the sense that we were all drifting upon a cloud of silk that soothed as we floated upon a zephyr.

It was nice to see Lisette without any clothes on for a change. While it lasted.
 

BARBIER, Georges. Au Revoir.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

Dawn broke and it was time for us to get dressed and leave.  Lisette, Jocelyn, and I said our goodbyes, and Ho Chi Minh, an Indo-Chinese dishwasher in Paris and part-time chauffeur working for Pops Marchande, drove the two of us back home.

BARBIER, Georges. Voici des ailes! (Here are my wings!).
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1925

We were both still rather dreamy from opium. It was a nightmare for me, however, when gum-on-my-shoe Jocelyn appeared out of nowhere; there was no scraping this woman off. "Here are my wings," the flapper said to Lisette, who had not only changed into yet another gown but had dyed her hair blonde before bedtime.

You know me, Al. I'll fight any joe who tries to horn in on my jane. But this Jocelyn! Geesh! She had bewitched Lisette and there was nothing I could do about it. They flew into the bedroom, the winged-spider carrying her prey aloft. The fly in the soup at supper tried to warn me but I wasn't listening...

I slept on the couch.

Gay Paree. Don't ask, don't tell. You didn't, I did. Sorry.

I'm joining the Foreign Legion.

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Apologies to Georges Barbier and Ring Lardner.

Booktryst  revisits Georges Barbier and his exquisite illustrations in pochoir in In Paris with Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier.
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