biography
pronunciation:
[nohdyay]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1780–1844)
|
| biography:
| Man of letters, born in Besançon, NE France. He studied entomology, publishing Traité sur les Antennes et les Ouïes des Insectes (1798), then turned to literature with a work on Shakespeare (1801), a novel Le Peintre de Salzbourg, journal des Emotions d'un Coeur souffrant (1803), a collection of poems Essais d'un jeune Barde (1804), and a light tale Le dernier Chapitre de mon Roman (1803). He made known English and German literature, then favoured antiquity with Smara ou les Démons de la nuit (1821). On the fall of the Empire, against which he had written a pamphlet La Napoléone, he returned to France with Royalist ideas (L'Histoire des Sociétés secrètes de l'armée ,1813) and began his series of tales (1824), such as La Fée aux Miettes, which has echoes of Lewis Carroll. Librarian at the Arsenal (1824–30), he organized soirées, described in the Mémoires of Dumas (père), which were frequented by the first Romantics, including Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve. In 1830 he published one of his first essays on Le Fantastique en Littérature. His interest in dreams made him a precursor of the analysts of the unconscious. The famous sonnet, ‘d'Arvers’, was written for his daughter, Marie, born in 1811. He entered the Académie Française in 1833. |
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