Gréville, HENRY

Gréville, HENRY, the pseudonym of Madame Alice Durand (née Fleury), who was born at Paris, 12th October 1842, accompanied her father when he was called to a chair at St Petersburg in 1857, and there married Émile Durand, a French professor of law, with whom she returned to France in 1872. Already at St Petersburg she had contributed romances to the journals; when at Paris she began to issue with almost too great rapidity a series of novels, often bright, vigorous, and original in their pictures of Russian society, but unequal, occasionally feeble, and sometimes even not free from the one fatal fault of dullness. Dosya (1876) received from the Academy the Montyon prize, and was followed by La Princesse Oghéroff (1876), Les Koumiassine (1877), Suzanne Normis (1877), La Maison Mauréze (1877), Les Épreuves de Raissa (1877), L'Amie (1878), Un Violon Russe (1879), Lucie Rodie (1879), Le Moulin Frappier (1880), La Cité Ménard (1880), Perdue (1881), Madame de Dreux (1881), Rose Rozier (1882), Un Crime (1884), Louis Breuil (1883), Idylles (1885), and Cléopâtre (1886).