Ex. 14-13: La flûte de Pan

No. 1 from Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis (L. 90), composed 1897–98 to prose poems by Pierre Louÿs. Premiered on 17 March 1900, with soprano Blanche Marot and Debussy himself at the piano.

The poems were presented as translations of an ancient Greek poetess named Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. In reality, they were entirely written by Louÿs himself — a literary forgery so convincing that expert scholars were deceived. A fictional archaeologist "Herr G. Heim" ("Mr. C. Cret" in German) was credited with discovering Bilitis's tomb.

The hoax eventually became famous in its own right. In 1955, the first lesbian civil rights organization in the United States was named the "Daughters of Bilitis" — its founders said, "If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club."