Considered a little too hastily as a figure of the ‘fin de siècle’, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) often throws readers off balance at first sight. It has to be said that, remaining on the margins of the literary schools and harbouring a rare originality, he broke with the aesthetics of his day, preferring a short form which was often closer to the concision of a poem than the unfolding quality of prose. It is this atypical writer that Jean-Pierre Bertrand has set out to decipher, positioning himself in the slipstream of Jules Renard, who in 1891 said of Schwob in his Journal: ‘An isolated case. He thinks that we have arrived late and, following our elders, there is only one thing left to do: write well.’

Rimbaud has remained the very prototype of the ‘meteor’ of letters. In his own way, certainly less flamboyant, Marcel Schwob also deserves to be described in similar terms. With the well-known difference that he didn’t fully enter the field of literature until the age of twenty-four, whilst the author of ‘The Drunken Boat’ had sprung into it at the very threshold of adolescence before abruptly abandoning it a few years afterwards. But if Rimbaud revolutionised poetry in a way no-one before him had and has been granted the posterity we know, Schwob today still remains little known out of the number of writers at the end of the nineteenth century and his influence on French literature remains in particular largely unsuspected.

And yet in his time he had all the attributes of ‘a prince of literature, an attentive observer of daily life and the discoverer of new talents’, as we are reminded in timely fashion by Jean-Pierre Bertrand. A professor at the University of Liège’s department of Romance languages and literatures, he has just published in a paperback edition Schwob’s Coeur double (Double Heart) and Le Livre de Monelle (The Book of Monelle) (Paris, Flammarion, ‘GF’, 344 pages), in which the two works are preceded by a particularly illuminating presentation and are followed by chronology and a lush bibliography concerning the author.

During his short life, he died at the age of thirty-seven, Schwob, the precociously talented son of a Nantes Republican journalist, met in particular Claudel, Léon Daudet, Oscar Wilde, Colette and Willy, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jules Renard, Octave Mirbeau, Paul Léautaud and André Gide. He was known in the literary salons of Paris, of course, and the host of Mallarmé’s famous ‘Tuesdays’. He also followed the courses of Saussure and Bréal at the Collège de France and, shortly before his death, undertook a course at the School of Higher Education entitled ‘The society and poetry of the fifteenth century. Paris society from 1430 to 1480. An explanation and comments on François Villon’s Grand Testament.’ Attending the course were, amongst others, Mac Orlan, Picasso and Michel Leiris.