Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

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Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly.

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Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without ever crossing the line into the supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

He was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Manche) in Normandy. In the 1850s, Barbey d'Aurevilly became the literary critic of Le Pays. Paul Bourget describes him as a dreamer with an exquisite sense of vision, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial every day world. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary views, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.

Barbey d'Aurevilly is buried alongside the castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte.

Beloved of Fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly is a classic example of what lengths the Romantics were capable of; his writings make it plain why the genre fell into discredit among later Victorians. He held extreme Catholic views, yet wrote on the most risqué subjects (a contradiction the English apparently found more disturbing than the French; Voltairianism would have been something else); he gave himself aristocratic airs and hinted at a mysterious past, though his parentage was entirely respectable and his youth humdrum and innocent.

Inspired by the character and ambience of Valognes, he set his works against the social backdrop of Normand aristocracy. Although he himself did not use the Norman patois, his example encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in his home region.

Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly died in Paris and was buried in the cimetière de Montparnasse. In 1926 his remains were transferred to the churchyard in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte.

[edit] Works

Une vieille maîtresse (An Elderly Mistress, 1851), attacked at the time of its publication on the charge of immorality, recently adapted to cinéma by the controversial director Catherine Breillat.
L'Ensorcelée (The Bewitched, 1854), an episode of the royalist rising among the Norman peasants against the first republic.
Chevalier Destouches (1864)
Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils, 1874), a collection of short stories, each of which relates a tale of a woman who commits an act of violence, a crime, or revenge.
Le Cachet d’Onyx, 1831
Léa, 1832
L’Amour impossible, 1841
La Bague d’Annibal, 1842
Un Prêtre marié, 1864
Une Histoire sans nom, 1882
Ce qui ne meurt pas, 1883