Pierre Louÿs might appear to belong more to the twentieth century than the nineteenth, since most of his adulthood was spent in the former. One year younger than his classmate and sometime friend André Gide, who is rightly considered one of the great modernists in France, Louÿs lived almost a quarter-century into the 1900s. In fact, however, he is preeminently an author of the last decade of the previous century. All three of the novels he finished and published in his lifetime appeared by 1901. Most of his stories and poetry, including the celebrated Chansons de Bilitis (1895; translated as The Songs of Bilitis, 1904), also were in print by the beginning of the new century. Moreover, his aesthetic is characteristic of that period, more so than of the new age of modernism, which developed in France just before and just after World War I. He...