Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly | Biography

As one of the most outrageous and outraged novelists and critics of nineteenth-century France, Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly weathered nearly all the major literary storms from romanticism to symbolism. In playing out his role as a dandy and literary eccentric par excellence, Barbey rant the gamut of poses and sartorial refinements that leads from George Brummell, Stendhal and Charles Baudelaire to such latter-day avatars as Joséphin Péladan, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rachilde, and Jean Lorrain. Barbey's extravagant literary manners and merciless pen, which earned him the nickname le Connétable des Lettres Franaises (High Constable of French Letters), are perhaps best exemplified graphically in his florid manuscripts copied in brilliant purple, orange, and green inks. His personal image is doubtless fixed for all time in the haughty, corseted figure, the frock coat, the dyed hair and mustache, the scarlet and black-braided robes. The lonely and somewhat wretched circumstances in which Barbey d'Aurevilly's long and...
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