Louis-Charles Royer (1885–1970) was a Parisian writer who specialised in popular erotic literature with titles like Love Camp, La maîtresse noire, Unrepentant Sinners, L’amour en Allemagne, The Redhead from Chicago, The Harem, La danseuse de Singapour, African Mistress, and L’amour chez les Soviets. On average he churned out one or two a year, from 1928 to the early 1960s, and some were regularly reprinted in both French and English.

Le désir (Desire), originally published in France in 1942 by Les Éditions de France and reissued in 1946 as part of the illustrated Collection du Carquois by Éditions Arc‑en‑Ciel, tells the story of a French doctor, Claude Sierroz, and his erotic involvements with three women – Kitty (‘bold and beautiful, she shows him how certain pleasures can work a cure for her, and for the doctor’), Magoune (‘although her broken leg is in a cast it doesn’t make her any less desirable, or desiring’), and Elise (‘for this attractive, lonely widow the doctor prescribes massages which he gives himself’). We are of course several decades before the MeToo era, and a novel about a young physician who enters into multiple romantic and sexual relationships with his patients was classic mid‑century pulp erotica material.

Le désir was translated into English under the title French Doctor, and published by Pyramid Books in 1951. It probably sold more copies in English than in French, and by 1960 had run through seven printings.

For the Arc‑en‑Ciel edition Schem produced a set of his trademark racy images, plus smaller end-of-chapter vignettes of the novel’s female participants.

The Schem-illustrated Le désir was published in a limited numbered and boxed edition of 2,500 copies.