The remarkably prolific French illustrator Jacques Touchet illustrated more than 65 books in a career spanning nearly four decades, and worked for all the major publishing houses of the period – René Kieffer, Briffaut, Piazza, Éditions de le Belle Étoile, Babou, and Rameau d’Or.

A pupil of illustrator and engraver Paul Renouard and caricaturist Louis Morin, he started his career in magazine illustration and advertising; it was a 1918 self-published album of sketches of his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Salonika (Thessalonica) that launched his book illustration.

Pierre Louÿs’ Les aventures du Roi Pausole for Rombaldi in 1937 was his twenty-fifth commission, and is included here to show how such a popular mainstream illustrator handled Louÿs’ rollicking erotic tale.