Happy birthday, Alexandre Dumas

It is the birthday of French writer Alexandre Dumas (1802), whose novels, The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845), The Count of Monte Cristo (1845-46) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (1847), are read throughout the world. He is one of the most widely known French authors ever. His major works have been adapted for almost 200 movies. Dumas also wrote travel books and plays. In recent times, scholars have discovered unpublished works by Dumas, including The Last Cavalier (2006). Dumas, a man of huge appetite, is said to have had 40 mistresses, and fathered at least four illegitimate children. Dumas' grandmother was an Afro-Caribbean slave, his grandfather a French nobleman who lived in Haiti. Dumas suffered racial prejudice and wrote about it in Georges (1843). In 2002, on Dumas' 200th birthday, French President Jacques had his ashes buried at the Pantheon of Paris next to Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.

Happy birthday, Honoré de Balzac

It is the birthday of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799), whose multi-volume collection of short stories, The Human Comedy (1815-1848), is renowned for his realistic depiction of life in France after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. His influence on literature is considerable. Among later novelists who considered him an inspiration were Proust, Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Henry James. Faulkner, Kerouac. Balzac wrote of life in France after the Revolution, money, power and social success, family relationships including motherhood and fatherhood, women in society and sex. His writing included elements of historical novels, popular novels,  fantasy novels, gothic novels, and metaphysical novels. 

Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote The Cathedral

Joris-Karl Huysmans

It is the birthday of French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848), whose most popular novel was The Cathedral (1898), a detailed study of the symbolism at the famous Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres. In it, Huysmans describes the cathedral in such magnificence that tourists used it as a guide book.

Huysmans worked for 32 years in a tedious job at the French Ministry of the Interior but kept writing in his free time. Sales of The Cathedral were so good that the income allowed him to retire early. The main character in the book, a novelist named Durtal, is a thinly disguised version of the writer. Durtal first appear in The Damned (1891), a novel that caused a stir because of its depiction of Satanism in France in that era, and it was banned from sale in railroad stations. The Damned first appeared in serialized form in a Paris newspaper, causing an uproar among the paper's subscribers.

Durtal also appeared in two other Huysmans novels, En route (1895), which tells of the beginning of the character's conversion to Catholicism, and The Oblate, which tells of Durtal's journey to becoming affiliated with a monastic religious community. The book parallels Huysmans own spiritual journey. It explores the nature of suffering and includes a description of the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed the day before his crucifixion.

Huysmans' earlier writing was quite different. He had attracted the attention of Emile Zola with his first novel, Marthe, the Story of a Girl (1876), that depicted life of a young prostitute, and The Vatard Sisters (1876), the story two sisters who struggle in life as they work in a book bindery. He became associated with Zola's Naturalist school of fiction. However, within eight years, Huysmans had broken with the tradition and began to write what was to be known as decadent literature. His most notorious novel was Against Nature (1884), in which the main character has an "alluring liaison" with "a cherry-lipped youth." The work influenced Oscar Wilde, and was featured in Wilde's trial on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.

In 1892, Huysmans was made a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor for his civil service. In 1905, he was promoted to officer in the Legion of Honor for his literary efforts. He wrote 29 books.

George Moore: Realism in Victorian England

George Moore

It is the birthday of Irish writer George Moore (1852), who originally wanted to be an artist and spent years as a teen and early adult in Paris in the 1870s among emerging painters like Degas, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro. Eventually he turned to writing. He was heavily influenced by the realist writing style of French novelist Emile Zola. He went to London and published Confessions of a Young Man (1886), in which he described bohemian life in Paris. Earlier he had published A Modern Lover (1883) in three volumes and A Mummers Wife (1885), both of which were sexually explicit and caused an uproar in literary circles. A later book, A Drama in Muslin (1886), satirizes the Anglo-Irish marriage trade. His book, Esther Waters (1894), tells the story of a poor kitchen maid in Victorian England who is seduced by a footman and then abandoned. She decides to raise her child as a single mother, a doubtful prospect at the time. It is considered his best novel.