‘My beautiful one, my love, my pet; you can teach me the religion of love! I the great lover, you the distant young love of my life – I am prepared to die in the beauty and ardour of your kiss!’ The eighteen-year-old Jeanne-Aurélie Grivolin, on holiday in Cherbourg, reads a letter from her older Parisian lover and believes every word. Except that neither the lover nor Mademoiselle Grivolin actually exist beyond the imagination of a schoolteacher from Lyons, Roger Pillet (1886–1918), who wrote Les oraisons amoureuses de Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin, Lyonnaise (The Love Petitions of Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin from Lyon) shortly before his early death. It was first published by Lyons publisher Deux-Collines in 1919 with illustrations by Pillet’s friend Pierre Combet-Descombes, and as well as the fantasy love-letters included a short ‘biography’ of Jeanne-Aurélie Grivolin, even giving her dates as 1784–1869.

And the book with its invented saccharine love-letters might well have disappeared from view, except that publishers kept eyeing the text with its excellent lover-to-lover gift potential, especially when suitably illustrated. René-Louis Doyon’s publishing house La Connaissance produced a limited edition illustrated by Yan Bernard Dyl in 1926, and when the large Paris publisher Denoël reprinted it in 1938 they also sold the English-language rights to Constable; when he discovered it James Bond author Ian Fleming gave an inscribed copy to his ‘secret’ lover Maud Russell. Constable translated Oraisons asBreviary of Love; being the private journal written at Lyon and Cherbourg during the years 1802–3 of Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin; the (good) translation was by Michael Sadler.

Then, ten years later, the Paris publishers Éditions du Moustié commissioned Suzanne Theureau to produce a new set of illustrations for a limited edition of Les oraisons amoureuses. Theureau handles colour with particular assurance, deploying a carefully limited palette across the portfolio, blue-grey grounds set against warm pinks, crimsons and ochres, giving the illustrations a visual coherence suited to the book's intimate text. Her compositional choices are often unexpectedly inventive – a bird's-eye view of a bedroom scene, a mirror that doubles the figures, small comic vignettes tucked into frames and oval portraits on the wall, all suggesting a dry wit alongside the elegant draughtsmanship.

Les oraisons amoureuses de Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin, Lyonnaise was published by Éditions du Moustié in a limited, numbered and boxed edition of 843 copies.