Spelling conundrum

[dr_whom]

So there's a song in Sunday in the Park with George, after Dot breaks up with George, when she's comparing George to her new boyfriend, Louie the baker. The song has lines including the following:

Louie's really an artist;
Louie's cakes are an art.

There are Louies and there are Georges—
Well, Louies... and George.

But of course the baker's name isn't "Louie". He's French, so his name is spelled "Louis", though pronounced the same as "Louie". So here's my conundrum:

How do you spell the above-quoted lines?

"Louis's really an artist; Louis's cakes are an art" isn't too bad. But how do you spell the plural, as in the second excerpt? In French, the plural of "Louis" is spelled (and pronounced) the same as the singular, but in an English text "There are Louis and there are Georges—well, Louis and George" would be completely opaque. "Louises" wouldn't be much better, since it's so misleading about the pronunciation. "Louiss" is obviously a total non-starter.

The published libretto has the following:

Louis' really an artist
Louis' cakes are an art

And there are Louis's
And there are Georges—
Well, Louis's
And George.

"Louis's" might be the only halfway natural-looking way to spell the plural that gets across the intent, much as one might object to using apostrophe-s to represent the plural ending. And there's some precedent for using a bare apostrophe for the possessive of a singular noun that ends with "s" ("for Jesus' sake"), but ordinarily in cases like that you don't pronounce the possessive suffix¹ either, so "Louis' cakes" is misleading in that way. And of course the baffling incorrectness of using a bare apostrophe for a contracted is ("Louis' really an artist") defies description.

What would you do? Is there any correct way out of this?

Also, let's all take a moment to be glad that Sondheim and Lapine chose to refer to their central character as "George", rather than by the French spelling of the name, "Georges", or we'd be stuck with something completely impenetrable like "There are Louis's and there are Georges's / Well, Louis's and Georges."

¹ It's a clitic, but never mind.

Comments

[ophblekuwufu.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'd misspell it Louie. That's by far the clearest way to do it.
But there might be some plausible solution from French. I don't know enough French to know what it might be, though.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Louix?

(this probably does not actually help)