Charles Paul de Kock
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Paul de Kock (1794-1871) found numerous readers for his ribald stories of sex sins in modern French society which he crammed into his fifty-five volumes. His namesake [and son] Henry did not lag far behind in lasciviousness. He sought to gain the favor of his readers with his saucy, scandalous work. History of Celebrated Libertines (1870), and wrote numerous other risque stories. The best known is The Murder in the Chestnut Forest in which the bloodthirsty and lubric achieve a unique amalgam." --The Erotic History of France |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Charles Paul de Kock (May 21, 1793 in Passy, Paris – April 27, 1871 in Paris) was a French novelist.
His father, Jean Conrad de Kock, a banker of Dutch extraction, victim of the Terror, was guillotined in Paris 24 March, 1794. His mother, Anne-Marie, was a Swiss. Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St. Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians.
He began to write for the stage very early, and composed many operatic libretti. His first novel, L'Enfant de ma femme (1811), was published at his own expense. In 1820 he began his long and successful series of novels dealing with Parisian life with Georgette, ou la Nièce du tabellion. His period of greatest and most successful activity was the Restoration and the early days of Louis Philippe. He was relatively less popular in France itself than abroad, where he was considered as the special painter of life in Paris. Major Pendennis' remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for thirty years except Paul de Kock, who certainly made him laugh, is likely to remain one of the most durable of his testimonials, and may be classed with the legendary question of a foreign sovereign to a Frenchman who was paying his respects, Vous venez de Paris et vous devez savoir des nouvelles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock? The disappearance of the grisette and of the cheap dissipation described by Henri Murger practically made Paul de Kock obsolete. But to the student of manners his portraiture of low and middle class life in the first half of the 19th century at Paris still has its value.
The works of Paul de Kock are very numerous. With the exception of a few not very felicitous excursions into historical romance and some miscellaneous works of which his share in La Grande yule, Paris (1842), is the chief, they are all stories of middle-class Parisian life, of guinguettes and cabarets and equivocal adventures of one sort or another. The most famous are André le Savoyard (1825) and Le Barbier de Paris (1826).
