Paul Bourget

Cosmopolis (Dodo Press) Paul Bourget

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (1852-1935), was a French novelist and critic. In 1884 Bourget paid a long visit to Britain, where he wrote his first published story L'Irréparable. Cruelle Enigme followed in 1885; then André Cornelis (1886) and Mensonges (1887) - inspired by Octave Mirbeau's life - were received with much favour. Le Disciple (1889) showed the novelist in a graver attitude; while in 1891 Sensations d'Italie, notes of a tour in that country, revealed a fresh phase of his powers. In the same year appeared the novel Coeur de Femme, and Nouveaux Pastels, "types" of the characters of men, the sequel to a similar gallery of female types (Pastels, 1890). His later novels include: La Terre Promise (1892); Cosmopolis (1892); Une Idylle Tragique (1896); La Duchesse Bleue (1897); Le Fantasme (1901); Les Deux Soeurs (1905); and some volumes of shorter stories-Complications Sentimentales (1896), the powerful Drames Defamille (1898), Un Homme Fort (1900), L'Etape (1902). This powerful study of contemporary manners was followed by Un Divorce (1904), a defence of the Roman Catholic position that divorce is a violation of natural laws.