“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote her friend Harriet Martineau in 1842. “They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I can read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.”
Kemble seems to have shared the opinion of many literate people of her time when it came to the man who was, for much of the 19th Century, France’s most popular novelist. Many were those who enjoyed his books. Fewer were those who would praise it. “The French writer whose works are best known in England is Monsieur Paul de Kock,” wrote William Thackeray in 1841. But, he cautioned, “Talk to a French educated gentleman about this author, and he shrugs his shoulders, and says it is pitoyable.” “Paul de Kock? he is very witty,” a woman once said to Jane Carlyle. “Yes, but also very indecent; and my uncle would not relish indecencies read aloud to him by his daughters.” Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted to having read one of de Kock’s stories, but hastened to add, “Its fun is so low that I will never lend it.”
Who was this controversial figure, whose books were considered as addictive and illicit as heroin? Well, he was a man whose entire life was consumed in his work. Starting with his first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme, published in 1811 when he was just 18, he proceeded to write, according to one biographer “de façon industrielle ensuite un roman en un mois chaque année” [in an industrial fashion followed one novel a month each year). Born in Paris, he claimed to have rarely left the city and spent most of his days at his desk in his house on the Boulevard St. Martin. The one luxury he allowed himself as the years passed was to purchase a house protected by high walls from the noise of the streets and curiosity of passers-by.
At first, however, the streets of Paris served as one of his primary inspirations. His book of essays, Scenes of Parisian Life, closes with a piece titled “Paris from My Window,” in which he records the life he observes on the boulevard in front of his house. Around two P.M., he notices an elderly couple promenading along. It is M. Mollet and his wife:
M. Mollet is a short, full-bodied, red-faced, knock-kneed man who constantly wears an entire suit of flannel and above that two shirts, thin drawers, thick woollen trousers, two waistcoats, a coat, a frock coat and an overcoat. You can understand that this enormous mass moves only with difficulty. When M. Mollet wants to get his handkerchief out of his pocket, he begins by sighing, then he stops, lets go of his wife’s arm, gives her his cane to hold, and tries to make use of his hands; but he is never quite certain in which of his pockets he has put his handkerchief, and the examination is often so long that Madame Mollet ends by lending her handkerchief to her husband, who takes it with a grateful look and murmurs, “Thank you, dearest!”
By 1830, he had surpassed the likes of Balzac in terms of popularity. His books typically sold 2-3,000 copies, while Balzac, Georges Sand, and Eugene Sue were pleased to sell more than 1,000 of theirs. “There never was an author more popular in the real meaning of the word,” Théophile Gautier later wrote. “He was read by everybody, by the statesman as well as by the commercial traveller and the schoolboy, by the great ladies in society and by the grisettes.” De Kock’s knowledge of the everyday life of Parisians earned the admiration not just of his readers but of some of his colleagues. He “had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers,” argued Gautier. “He shared their ideas, their opinions, their prejudices, their feelings.” In fact, when the works of Charles Dickens first began to be published in France, his French publisher invoked the name of Paul de Kock in advertisements to gain the confidence of readers.
In her book Mastering the Marketplace: Book Subtitle: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, Anne O’Neil-Henry, one of the few academics in recent decades to take an interest in de Kock, calls him “the July Monarchy’s bourgeois writer par excellence,” but acknowledges that “by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: ‘Paul de Kock’ signified ‘bad’ literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste.” O’Neil-Henry argues that this is missing the point. “While critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.” “Simply put,” she writes, “’Paul de Kock’ did not always signify ‘Paul de Kock.”
In 1835, the English publisher Marston and Company advertised a collection of de Kock’s works that would be “carefully weeded from the indelicacy and impiety from which scarcely any French work is entirely exempt.” At the same time, however, they boasted that “A more thorough insight into French manners and customs may be acquired from one of de Kock’s novels than from fifty volumes of travels.”
His reputation throughout Europe was, in the mid-19th Century, that of an exceptional novelist. The young Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote his father in 1844, “Paul de Kock is unquestionably the most amusing and the most natural of the novelists. The interest of his works never flags for a moment, and even his pathetic scenes are perfectly true and unaffected.” Leo Tolstoy was a fan.“Don’t tell me any of that nonsense that Paul de Kock is immoral,” he was quoted as saying, “He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, free and rough, but he is never immoral.” When the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière visited Pope Leo XIII in the early 1880s, the Pope asked, “And how is the good Paolo de Koko?” In his book Sex Lives of the Popes, Nigel Cawthorne writes that Pope Gregory XVI shared his appreciation for the novelist. Benjamin Disraeli so admired de Kock that he worked an endorsement into his novel Henrietta Temple:
“Have you ever read Paul de Kock’s books?”
“Never,” said Ferdinand.
“What a fortunate man to be arrested ! Now you can read Paul de Kock! By Jove, you are the most lucky fellow I know!”
De Kock could be counted on to provide entertainment value for money. To judge his merits, I tried That Rascal Gustave, one of the two dozen de Kock novels that were packaged in a mammoth edition published by Mathieson in London in the 1880s and available on the Internet Archive (link).
The book opens with young Gustave de Moranval being caught in a Paris love-nest with an 18-year-old girl from his home village by his uncle. The uncle dismisses the girl with a pay-off and dispatches Gustave to the home of M. de Berly in the Loire Valley with the aim of getting him married off to de Berly’s niece. The niece loves another, however, and Gustave’s roving eye gets him into some awkward situations. There are several incidents involving jumping from windows and having to put on women’s clothes.
In the scene that probably earned the book its scandalous reputation, Gustave finds himself hiding under the bed on the night that the niece and her new husband return to chez de Berly.
They fastened the door, and prepared to retire, so there were no means of escape for him, and he would be only too lucky if he were not discovered, as he could not even be taken for a thief since Aurelia knew him, and thus Julia [Gustave’s amoureux du moment] must be compromised; he made up his mind, therefore, to stay under the bed, happy if no one should turn him out of his hiding place. He lay on his back, hoping that Providence would not allow either monsieur or madame to look under the bed, as timorous souls so frequently do, waiting in perfect silence, without daring to move, and hardly to breathe, trusting that love or chance would enable him to escape.
As the couple prepares for bed, the bride is taken aback at her husband’s insistence on wearing a flannel vest and cotton night-cap, and reminds him of the Bible’s instructions: “When we are married, we must mutually meet each other’s desires, and even forestall them, and it allows us to enjoy the pleasures of marriage by begetting children in our own likeness.” What he then hears “opened his eyes as to the real character of the ‘prude’ he had first met at the residence of M. de Berly. Gustave finally manages to escape in the next chapter, entitled, “Julia Loses Her Beauty and Gustave Loses His Trousers.”
The next three years take Gustave on a grand tour of the salons and bedrooms of Spain, Italy, and England. He finds England’s tastes particularly mystifying:
Nobody can care for England who does not find his chief pleasure in horse-riding, cock-fighting, betting, punch, and plum-pudding, and it strikes a Frenchman as very strange to see all the ladies leave the room soon after the dessert is put on the table, whilst the gentlemen remain for such mirth as may be inspired by drinking burnt brandy.
In the end, he finds his way back to his home village, where the young woman he’d been caught with in Paris and born his child and won her way into the uncle’s affection – proving that “that virtue, gentleness, talent, and beauty can well replace birth and wealth.” And they all live happily ever after.
“It was Gustave especially which got me talked about,” de Kock later wrote in his memoirs:
Not in terms of praise by everybody. Oh, no. Many persons found the book rather too coarse, but I for my part declare, and I do so without a blush, that neither at that time nor later, did I feel the slightest remorse for my crime. To speak frankly, come, can you expect a novel called Gustave ou le Mauvais Sujet to have anything in common with Telemaque — unless it be where the son of Ulysses goes to chat, on the sly, in the caves, with the beautiful nymph Eucharis?…. At any rate many ladies were very gracious to me after reading Gustave. Ladies, evidently, who liked bad boys. There used to be ladies of that kind in those days.
To produce at the rate he did, de Kock understandably relied on certain formulas. French critic Jacques Migozzi has described it as, “Playing allegro presto with mistakes, surprises with a narrative or playful function, coincidences, misunderstandings or mystifications, and spicing up his story with burlesque episodes and bantering.” De Kock’s penchant for comedy made him the favorite of many readers. “When the vapours have smothered the sun, and when it rains, as it does always, instead of inhaling charcoal! or leaping from the Pont Neuf,” wrote John Sanderson in his 1838 book, The American in Paris, “I go into a cabinet de lecture, and read Paul de Kock. No author living can carry one so laughingly through a wet day.”
There’s a good share of slapstick in That Rascal Gustave, enough to make one wonder why his novels haven’t been mined for more movie scripts. Here, for example, is how Gustave’s village love escapes from one awkward situation:
Susan, on hearing this, put both her legs out of the window, and this time she reached the ground, but she stumbled against Thomas, who knocked up against Mother Lucas, who fell over the greengrocer, who fell over the grocer, and so on. Pushing each other along, they got as far as the chateau, and then they did not push each other any more, and it was just as well, as they might otherwise have fallen into the moat which surrounds it.
At the same time, he could also be counted on to end on a moral note, reinforcing good bourgeois values.
By the time of his death in 1871, de Kock’s reputation had already begun to wane. Part of the problem, according to Gautier, was that he had unwittingly become a historical novelist:
His works contain the description of manners in a civilisation differing as greatly from our own as does that the traces of which are found in Pompeii; his novels, which people read formerly for amusement’s sake, will henceforth be consulted by erudites desirous of recreating life in that old Paris which I knew in my youth and of which the vestiges will soon have vanished…. Some of his novels have the same effect upon me as Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans; I seem to read in them the story of the last of the Parisians, invaded and submerged by American civilisation.
Ironically, it was just about the same time that de Kock’s novels gained traction, if not esteem, among readers outside France. Advertisements of his books began to be found in the pages of magazines from Manchester to Minnetonka, often tweaking his titles to play up their suggestiveness. Thus, Pantalon became Madame Pantaloons; Gustave, ou le mauvais sujet [the bad fellow] became That Rascal Gustave; Le démon de L’Alcove became The Vampire. Others needed no help, though: Cards, Women and Wine; The Courtesan; The Cuckold; Bride of the First Night; Wife, Husband, and Lover.
Not everyone thought this was a good thing. A bookseller in Liverpool was brought up on charges of trafficking in impure literature for carrying such titles as That Rascal Gustave. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was scandalized to find that a Cincinnati bookstore carried more copies of de Kock’s novels than of his sermons. One English traveler, reporting from Lima, Peru in 1881, lamented that “There was not a single decent edition of Don Quixote to be found in all the shops of the city,” but that there was “a brisk sale for indecent photographs and cheap editions of Paul de Kock novels.” A New England sea captain held the books responsible for the moral decay of many a young sailor: “Cheap novels, which record the imaginary exploits of highwaymen and pirates, constitute the chief entertainment” and “contribute their corrupting influences to poison the minds of hundreds of young and inexperienced sailors, and thus pave their way to those ‘houses of death,’ from which ‘none that go ever return again; neither take they hold of the paths of life.’”
Yet at almost the same time, several publishers outdid themselves in releasing ornate editions of de Kock’s works. Mathieson & Co. in London, George Barrie & Sons in Philadelphia, and the Jefferson Press and Frederick J. Quinby Company in Boston all published sets of twenty or more volumes. Quinby’s was the most elaborate, with red or teal blue leather bindings, Art nouveau flowers ornamentations, and illustrations by John Sloan, William Glackens, and others. In fact, it was a bit too elaborate, as Quinby only managed to publish 42 of a planned total of 50 volumes before going out of business in 1908.
By the turn of the 20th Century, however, de Kock’s name had become synonymous for lowbrow in most English-speaking countries. He pops up several times in 1904 Dublin as depicted in Joyce’s Ulysses. “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.” Molly Bloom recalls that her first lover “offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.” Yet he’d also become tame enough for Pearson’s Magazine to advertise an edition of That Rascal Gustave as a freebie with new subscriptions and the Boston Globe to serialize one of his novels, The Maid of Belleville, on the front page of its Sunday magazine in 1917.
Today, if we set aside over-priced print on demand reprints of his ancient editions, the works of Paul de Kock haven’t seen a new English edition (or translation) in at least a century. Even among bibliophiles, his work is now so devalued that a complete set of the Quinby edition in excellent condition was sold recently at auction for little more than $10 a volume. While he’s no candidate for elevation to the same shelf as Balzac or Flaubert, somewhere in his pile of hundreds of titles, there must be a few that merit rediscovery as, say, a 19th Century French counterpart to P.G. Wodehouse or some other prolific comic master. Anyone up for a deep-dive?