Legendary French Porn Novelist ‘Esparbec’ Passes Away

LOS ANGELES—Georges Pailler, the prolific French pornographic novelist better known by his pseudonym “Esparbec,” has died at age 87, his publisher La Musardine announced on its Facebook page Tuesday. The announcement said that Pailler passed away on Monday, June 6, though a cause of death was not given. Pailler wrote under several pen names, but was most recognizable by “Esparbec,” under which he published as many as 170 pornographic novels, according to an obituary published by the French newspaper Le Figaro, which described him as “the most emblematic of contemporary pornographers.” He was unabashed about labeling himself a pornographer, and always fought for pornographic writing to be recognized as serious literature.  “There are good thrillers, good science fiction books, why not good porn?" he once said, as quoted by Le Figaro. “Why should pornography be left to second-rate writers? Why leave it to sex shops?” Pailler also said that he was inspired by 18th-century “libertine” authors of erotica, such as the novelist Nicolas-Edme Rétif, also knows as Restif de la Bretonne, whose graphically erotic writings gave rise to the term “retifism,” meaning shoe fetishism. Among Pailler's many novels, written as Esparbec, were such titles as The Sin of the Flesh, The Roving Hands, The Panties, Debauchery, and The Taste of Sin. But perhaps his best-known novel was more blandly titled, The Pharmacist. “Bertrand and his sister, 15-year-old twins, live with their mother and her second husband. The mother, a pharmacist, is a bourgeois woman who, after being widowed, marries a waiter ten years her junior,” reads a publisher’s description of the novel’s plot. “The pharmacist is convinced that the games her husband and children play are very innocent, but the reality is quite different.”  Esparbec had a devoted following among the French intelligentsia, but one of his biggest fans was cartoonist and writer Georges Wolinski, of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Wolinski was killed in the 2015 terrorist attack on that magazine’s headquarters. "What Esparbec writes is scandalous, dirty, fascinating and scary,” Wolinski once wrote in Charlie Hebdo, in an essay on Esparbec’s work. “Like everything we repress.” Photo By La Musardine Facebook Page