David Coward is emeritus professor of French at the University of Leeds. His translation of Hedi Kaddour’s Waltenberg will be published next spring.
One day in about 1820, so the story goes, a peasant appeared at the Bibliothèque Nationale with a cart drawn by a mule. In the cart, he said, were ‘tous les papiers de Molière’ and they were for sale. But the Library was closed and the concierge told him to come back another day. He never did and ‘Molière’s papers’ were doubtless offloaded as...
Was the creator of Figaro on the side of the angels or simply president of Beaumarchais Enterprises? In his lifetime, he was an upstart in the eyes of the great and the good, and governments suspected his motives. The middle classes envied his wealth and rejoiced at his failures, but saw him as the embodiment of successful enterprise and the defender of their cause. Popular opinion, which he manipulated expertly, hailed him as a hero, at least until 1789, when the adoring crowd spotted feet of clay and turned on him.
In 1974, aged 71, having announced the end of a writing career that had produced nearly two hundred novels, and having retreated from a mansion with 11 servants to a small house in Lausanne...
Proust said he didn’t understand how critics could divide literary works into good and bad patches, admiring the first half of a novel by Gautier but not the second, praising everything to...
David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal...
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