Louis-Charles Royer (1885–1970) was a Parisian writer who specialised in popular erotic literature with titles like Love Camp, La maîtresse noire, Unrepentant Sinners, L’amour en Allemagne, The Redhead from Chicago, La danseuse de Singapour, African Mistress, and L’amour chez les Soviets. On average he churned out one or two a year, from 1928 to the early 1960s, and some were regularly reprinted in both French and English.

Le sérail (The Harem) was first published in 1931, and centres on a painter, Michel Faulcroix, who abandons his respectable Parisian banker life to become part of a Mediterranean paradise, a kind of erotic commune, with his brother Bernard and three beautiful young women, Jacqueline, Lore and Irene, all living and loving together. The three women become Michel’s ‘harem’, pursuing a pact of group marriage and shared sensual experiences.

Le sérail – the French word is directly related to ‘seraglio’ – plays with orientalist tropes, situating its French characters in a Mediterranean environment where western inhibitions are shed in an imagined erotic playground. It is steeped in the melodrama of erotic fantasy and exoticism typical of Royer’s style and subject matter.

Le sérail was translated into English very soon after it was written, and was published as The Harem by Greenberg Books in New York in 1932; it was reissued in paperback by Dell in 1952 and Pyramid Books in 1954, becoming by far the best known of Royer’s novels in English.

Gaston Barret’s light, airy style is perfect as a choice of illustrator for this well-written and well-imagined fantasy.

The Barret-illustrated Le sérail was published by Éditions Arc-en-Ciel in a limited numbered edition of 2,500 copies.