Fenillet

Fenillet, OCTAVE, a distinguished French novelist, born at Saint-Lô, in La Manche, 11th August 1812. He was numbered for some time in the band of Dumas' literary assistants, and began his own literary career with Le Fruit défendu, in the Revue Nouvelle. From 1848 he published in the Revue des Deux Mondes a series of proverbs, comedies, tales, and romances, collected in Scènes et Proverbes and Scènes et Comédies (5 vols. 1853-55). Elected Scribe's successor in the French Academy (1862), and afterwards librarian to the emperor, he died 29th December 1890. Some of the earlier novels, as the pathetic story La Petite Comtesse, gave promise of power, but his popularity as a novelist really awoke with the publication of the masterpiece Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre (1858), and the only less beautiful Sibylle (1862). These were followed by M. de Camors (1867), Julia de Trécaur (1872), Un Mariage dans le Monde (1875), Les Amours de Philippe (1877), Le Journal d'une Femme (1878), Histoire d'une Parisienne (1881), and the striking La Mort (1886). He has written many successful comedies, but it remains true that his dramatic faculty is more effectively displayed in his novels than in his work for the stage. Feuillet has many excellent gifts as a writer of fiction. His stories are cleverly constructed, gracefully told, and unstained by coarseness; he is thoroughly acquainted with the high circles in which his characters move; he has pathos and even passion at his command. Yet he cannot be classed as a great novelist. He has never created a really strong character; he frequently strikes a false note; he indulges in morbid sentimentalism, and has a weakness for treating dubious situations while posing as a strict moral teacher. These defects are in the main unapparent in Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, but the story, though interesting and in parts charming, yet fails to leave a powerful impression on the reader.