Kock, CHARLES PAUL DE

Kock, CHARLES PAUL DE (1794-1871), born at Passy, near Paris, was the son of a Dutch banker who perished on the scaffold during the French Revolution. He devoted himself to literature against the wishes of his relatives, and produced an endless series of novels, vivacious, piquant, and readable, but hardly reaching the dignity of literature. However, they will retain their value as pictures of lower middle-class life in Paris in the first half of the 19th century, especially in its shadier sides; and they display a marvellous fertility in the invention of incidents, more or less equivocal in character, in the life of the French bourgeoisie, its cabarets, and its guinguettes. His undeniable gifts are marred by a coarse vulgarity that seems in grain, and an utter absence of style. Yet his stories were for long immensely popular, and we know that for thirty years they were the sole reading of Major Pendennis. Here may merely be named Georgette; Gustave; Le Barbier de Paris; La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant; Mœurs Parisiennes. The collected edition of his works fills 56 vols. (1844-45). See his Mémoires written by Himself (1899).—HENRI DE KOCK, his son (born 1821; died 17th April 1892), followed his father as closely as he could, with a series of far weaker novels. Another work is his Souvenirs de Napoléon III. à Wilhelmshohe (1871).