Saint-Victor, PAUL DE, a superfine French writer, was born at Paris in 1827, the son of a poet who translated Anacreon and became a fine connoisseur in painting. He had his education at Freiburg in Switzerland and at the Collegio Romano at Rome, and made his début in 1851 as a dramatic critic in the Pays, under the protection of Lamartine, whom he had already served as secretary. In 1855 he carried his pen to the Presse, later to La Liberté, and last to the Moniteur Universel. He quickly made himself famous by his knowledge and insight, and by a brilliant style, marred only by its affectedness and over-elaboration. Sense of colour, imagination, a quick eye for the picturesque in everything, and the sovereign gift of the artist—the intuition of individuality—made him a word-painter of the first rank, while his severity of taste and his sense of form saved him from extravagance. Yet his style is splendid, Oriental or at least Italian rather than French—even in his appearance he was a Venetian who had stepped out of his canvas. 'When I read Saint-Victor, I put on blue spectacles,' said Lamartine, and Victor Hugo wrote to him, after reading his review of the Travailleurs de la Mer, 'One would write a book merely to make you write a page.' His first book was Hommes et Dieux (1867), a series of historico-aesthetic studies on the Venus of Milo, Diana, Ceres,
Helen, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, Cæsar Borgia, and Henry III. Later books were Les Deux Masques, tragédie-comédie (3 vols. 1879-83); Anciens et Modernes (1886); Les Femmes de Goethe (1869); Victor Hugo (1885); and Barbares et Bandits. Saint-Victor was reserved in temperament, and indeed, to speak truly, was something of a coxcomb. He lived an uneventful life, was for some years General Inspector of Fine Arts, and died at Paris, 9th July 1881. See the study by Alidor Delzant (1887), which reveals to us the strangely mechanical method in which he wrote. He first selected certain words, spread them about his page like colours on a palette, next grouped round them other euphonious terms, and lastly strung the whole together in a proposition.