The Zemganno Brothers is Edmond de Goncourt’s love letter to his dead brother and collaborator, Jules. Together, the two had written six novels, several plays, and even more works of history and criticism, in addition to keeping a journal that is considered the most candid (and savage) account of mid-19th century Parisian life and society. Jules died from the effects of syphillis at the age of 39. Edmond carried on as a writer but never considered his own work anything but second-best to what he’d accomplished with Jules.
In 1876, over six years after Jules’ death, Edmond confided to his journal, “I want to depict two acrobats, two brothers who love each other has my brother and I have loved each other.” His idea was that these brothers would not only work together as he did with Jules, but literally support each other: “Their spines are, so to speak, common property” and they would strive to develop their strengths and skills to the point that they could perform feats previously considered impossible.
Edmond visited the Cirque Olympique in Paris while writing the book, and was particularly taken by the act of the Hanlon-Lees, whose blend of tumbling, juggling, and knockabout clowning the French called entortillage. The Zemganno brothers achieve acrobatic feats to rival those of the Hanlon-Lees, but instead of juggling, they incorporate the playing of violins (which was probably easier to describe than it would have been to perform).
The Zemganno brothers mirror the de Goncourts: Gianni, the elder, is able and temperate; Nello, the younger, is more talented and hot-headed. But they commit to their partnership and a vision of becoming legendary performers when still young, and work their way up, from a humble circus traveling around France by wagon and cart, to an initial attempt to join a grand circus in Paris and then, when that fails, to London, where they spend years studying the English form of highly physical clowning and tumbling. Finally, having worked on a series of tricks in secret, they return and are quickly taken into the troupe of the Deux-Cirques, the premier indoor circus in Paris.
Their act is a combination of comedy, melodrama, and physical magic. At its climax, Gianni appears to humiliate Nello, who falls to the ground and lays there prostrate. Then, suddenly, he is transformed:
His muscles worked in a way beyond their normal powers and danger-point, his loins became hollows, his shoulder blades jutted fantastically, and his spine took on an unaccustomed curve, archied like the crop of a wading bird strayed from another planet. His muscles were one mass of quick, tiny ripples, like those seen beneath the flaccid skin of a snake. All that the audience could see now was a creature flying without wings, a crawling, unearthly, demon-haunting quality of movement associated with beasts of ill-omen and horrible fables. But at last the demon was driven out of the sprite’s bosom.
Despite their successful, however, outside the ring, they lead “a quiet, orderly, intimate, sober and chaste life.” Their focus, their passion is to push the limits of their bodies and continue to master ever-more-difficult stunts.
When an American trick rider, la Tompkins, joins the circus, however, the bond between Gianni and Nello strains. Not so much out of romance as the realization that la Tompkins’ act is of a level of polish and mastery that puts theirs to shame. And this drives Nello in particular to attempt riskier leaps. Anyone who’s seen a circus movie knows where this leads.
The Zemganno Brothers is that rarity, a 19th century novel that is neither novella nor three-volume behemoth. Under 200 pages in its excellent English translation by Lester Clark and Iris Allan, it’s as lean and swift as the Zemganno brothers themselves. While certainly not a masterpiece, it’s a memorable story and a moving tribute from one brother to another.
The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Lester Clark and Iris Allan London: Alvin Redman, 1957
Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.
When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:
The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.
George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.
The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:
This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.
The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.
It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.
As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”
Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:
When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?
Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”
And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”
Victor Hugo in 1848.
As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.
This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:
There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.
He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.
The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):
One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….
The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].
“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.
“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.
“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”
The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]
“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”
The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.
Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”
He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.
“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.
Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.
Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”
Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:
An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.
Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.
Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.
Choses vues, by Victor Hugo Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition
An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock.
“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.
Paul de Kock’s study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock.
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.
A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.
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!”
Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar.
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.”
M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of That Rascal Gustave.
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.”
Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne.
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.
Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.
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.’”
A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.
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.
Ad for a free copy of Gustave with a subscription to Pearson’s Magazine.
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?
