Alice, Simonne, Marcelle, Andrée: Souvenirs érotiques d’un homme de qualité touchant les petites cousines – les femmes du monde et les belles filles de province (Alice, Simonne, Marcelle, Andrée: Erotic memoires of an ardent man of quality with his little cousins – women of the world and beautiful provincial girls); the four of the title are teenage cousins on holiday at their uncle’s rural retreat. Les petites cousines explores how the ‘little cousins’ learn about how intimacy and sexuality play out in the middle-class liberté of early twentieth-century French family life, along with liberal doses of ‘acceptable’ incest, paedophilia and corporal punishment. This is a new edition of a 1919 narrative by the prolific erotica writer Pierre Mac Orlan, first published under the pseudonym ‘Sadinet’.

‘Alice and I were in the small living room. It was hot. A nervous pretty little girl, it was as if she were in the grip of atmospheric electricity. She laughed strangely, lifted herself onto the couch, threw her legs up, and arranged them so as to show me her thighs and knickers, showing a little bare skin between the stockings and the lace of the knickers. The sight of the soft white thighs excited me prodigiously, and I watched her with an embarrassed sideways glance. Alice was teasing me. She looked at me with large, mischievous eyes and observed me with a smile. “Let’s play patient and doctor,” she said. She continued to direct the action just as she wished.’

These are the first explicitly erotic illustrations definitely attributed to Schem/Raoul Serres, and certainly have something of the quality of both the 1946 Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles and the 1950 Roi Pausole.

Alice, Simonne, Marcelle, Andrée was published ‘Aux dépens d’un amateur et pour ses amis’ (At the expense of an amateur and for his friends) in a limited numbered edition of 255 copies.