Paul Verlaine’s Femmes (Women) is a collection of eighteen poems published in 1890 to celebrate Verlaine’s women friends and lovers, forms part of the poet’s notorious Oeuvres libres; two years later Daragnès also illustrated Les amies (1867), a set of sonnets in praise of lesbian love.
The powerful Daragnès woodcuts for Femmes appeared in two book formats in 1917; an earlier version with just six monochrome images was published in a very small edition under the pseudonym Jean de Guéthary, with the publisher shown as Chez Chikokoillara (what the significance of either was we shall probably never know), and an extended version later, now with the cuts in black and bistre, published by Au Coq Hardi, or ‘The Bold Rooster’. Both editions were almost certainly self-published.