Jasmin

Jasmin, JACQUES, a modern Gascon poet, was born at Agen, 6th March 1798. He has given in his Soubenis (1830) a humorous account of the poverty and privations of his early life. He earned his living as a barber; but wrote poetry in his native Languedoc dialect. His first volume, entitled Papillotos ('Curl Papers'), appeared in 1835. He greatly enhanced his reputation by reciting his own poems in public. His poetry is full of beauty and power; the pathos of his serious and the wit of his comic pieces are of a high order. His poems were received with enthusiasm in France and even other parts of Europe. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1846, and in 1852 his works were crowned by the French Academy and a prize awarded to him. He published four volumes of poems in all; the best pieces are The Charivari (1825), a mock-heroic poem; The Blind Girl of Castel-Cuillé (1835), trans. by Longfellow; Francchetto (1840); The Twin Brothers (1841); Martha the Simple (1845); and The Son's Week (1849). These poems raised Jasmin's native tongue to the dignity of a literary language, and initiated a literary and linguistic movement in the south of France which has gone on spreading and thriving since his death (at Agen, on 4th October 1864). See French Lives by Rabain (1867) and J. Andrien (1882), and vol. iii. of Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Contemporains, and the Life by Samuel Smiles (1892).