Georges Joseph Marilly (1900–72) was a tax inspector to most who knew him, but to readers of a certain genre of erotic literature Georges Marilly was also the author of gently titillating romances set mostly in the boudoirs of the eighteenth century. As well as L’apprentissage amoureux (The Amorous Apprentice), L’homme à l’alouette d’or (The Man with the Golden Lark), and Amour toujours (Love Forever), he wrote short erotic stories for under-the-counter magazines like Minuit Pigalle.

All of Marilly’s erotic fiction was produced between 1949 and 1959, by which time the market for gently provocative erotic period fantasy had mostly dried up.

L’apprentissage amoureux was published, like several other Bécat-illustrated titles, in the series Le coffret du bibliophile, and has a short introduction by the writer, literary critic and painter Paul Reboux (1877–1963). Paul Reboux writes:

Georges Marilly has applied himself, with charming grace, to transforming not only the feelings of the French of the eighteenth century, but also their way of seeing, feeling, reacting and loving. He has done so with an unusual scrupulousness that is very rare in our age, and has done it with extraordinary flexibility.
     Holding this small volume in your hands is to have the impression of turning the pages of a text composed in hand-assembled type, printed on laid paper, and bound in brown sheepskin stamped with gold leaf. The smallest details in which the varied scenes unfold, every detail the author describes for us, are surprisingly accurate; chandeliers and nightlights are extinguished and relit, candles are blown out, and wine from those years is drunk just as it was drunk in its prime. Caresses are exchanged, not in the manner practiced by those whose conventions we now follow, but strictly in the eighteenth-century manner.
     A young painter, enamoured of the art of Boucher or Fragonard, enters as a pupil of one of the artists who have transmitted to us the way women of that era were beautiful. But the teacher has married a wife who is too young, and our young student fully satisfies the young woman by giving her what the old man is incapable of. As the Spanish say, love is the fire that ignites itself, and the devil is the wind that blows it out. 
     The initiation into the realms of love that the young artist experiences is led not only by this ardent, beautiful, unsatisfied woman, but also by other equally desirable young women, who shower him with all the delights of love. Not a single feature is spared; the entire story is told with ravishing grace and honest decorum.