One of his first officially noted works was the first "artist's" label for the famous wine from Château Mouton Rothschild in 1945, in memory of the World War II victory over Germany.
He produced illustrations for his own books as well as works by Honoré de Balzac, Colette, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde, among others.
These include the biography Robert de Montesquiou (1965), Prince of Aesthetes (1967), Esthétes et Magiciens (1969) translated as Dreamers of Decadence (1971), Les Symbolistes (1973), and The Triumph of Art Nouveau (1974).
His gift for satire is evident both in fiction such as La Fuite en Egypte (1968; published as The Flight into Egypt, 1970) and in his works of social satire, including Dictionnaire du Snobisme ("The Snob-Spotter's Guide", 1958), Les Collectioneurs ("The Collectors", 1967), and most notably his collaboration with the British novelist Angus Wilson, For Whom the Cloche Tolls: A Scrap-Book of the Twenties (1953), which he also illustrated.
Other books include Montmartre (1977) and Les Orientalistes (1977), works of art history; and biographies of Edward VII (1962), Wilde (1967), Gabriele D'Annunzio (1971), Jean Lorrain (1974), Violet Trefusis (1976), and Sarah Bernhardt.