Paul Avril

Photo Mosaic

Paul Avril was the pen name of Edouard-Henri Avril, a French artist who lived two lives in one, which is the most Geminian fate imaginable. His Sun in Gemini is the marriage of Helios and Mercury, always two persons in one: born in Algiers to a gendarmerie colonel, he was first a soldier, wounded in the Franco-Prussian War and given the Legion of Honour, before he ever lifted a brush. Then came the second self, the illustrator, versatile enough to move between the classics (Horace, Daphnis et Chloe, Flaubert's Salammbo) and the underground galante literature that made his name.

That Gemini Sun sits in the twelfth house, the unknowable, veiled realm, and fittingly his art lived in secrecy: erotica issued in editions of a hundred, sold to private collectors, a body of work half-hidden behind a pseudonym. His Moon, exalted in Taurus in the eleventh, gave him the sensual eye of Venus and a place among the bibliophile societies and collectors who were his tribe. With Cancer rising, the soft lunar mask, he guarded that inner world closely. A twin who painted what others kept in the dark.