Oscar Wilde first published Salomé in French in 1893. The story of the play is loosely based on the biblical passage that tells of John the Baptist's beheading after the daughter of Herodias dances for Herod. In Wilde's version, it is Salome, not her mother, who demands John's head on a silver platter. The first English edition, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act,was published in 1894 by The Bodley Head and illustrated with 10 full-page pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. Both the text and its images were controversial. The publisher, John Lane, suppressed some of Beardsley's illustrations; these were later published in the 1907 edition. Oscar Wilde did not like Beardsley's illustrations. "My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau--wrapped in his jewels and sorrows. My Salomé is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Sainte Thérèse who worships the moon; dear Aubrey's designs are like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks" (Jean-Paul Raymond and Charles Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections).