Background
Lemaître was born in Vennecy, near Orleans.
(Excerpt from Discours Royalistes, 1908-1911 Que me deman...)
Excerpt from Discours Royalistes, 1908-1911 Que me demandez-vous là? Il faudrait y Mais, au fait, j'ai déjà répondu, il y a quatre ou cinq ans, dans de très sincères articles qui ont paru depuis en brochure sous ce titre Un nouvel état d'esprit. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Lemaître was born in Vennecy, near Orleans.
Educated in Orleans and in Paris, he was graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Lemaitre served as teacher in Le Havre and Algiers before devoting himself entirely to journalism and literature.
His first publication was a volume of verse, Les Medaillons (1880), deft and unoriginal. His short stories, particularly the collections Myrrha (1894) and En marge des vieux livres (1905 - 1907), are ironical and witty. In bookish inspiration, they are like the tales of Anatole France, which eclipsed them. Though Lemaitre's stories are completely detached from contemporary life, his plays are modern in theme and highly conservative in their moralizing, notably Le Mariage blanc (1891) and Le Pardon (1895).
It is as a critic, however, that Lemaitre is most important. From 1884 to the end of the century he reviewed both plays and books. His literary criticisms were published as Les Contemporains (7 volumes, 1885 to 1899) and his dramatic reviews as Impressions de theatre (10 volumes, 1888 - 1898). Charmingly written, these collections remain a valuable record of the period, in spite of an increasing conservatism that made Lemaitre hostile to new ideas and techniques.
This spirit of reaction distorted much of his later and most important works - the four series of lectures, which he immediately revised and published in book form: J. J. Rousseau (1907); Jean Racine (1908); FénelonFenelon (1910); and Chateaubriand (1912). Of these, the volume on Racine is the least affected by prejudice and offers the most valid criticism.
(Excerpt from Discours Royalistes, 1908-1911 Que me deman...)
In politics, Lemaitre's love for tradition brought him into the campaign against Captain Dreyfus, and thereafter he expended his undeniable talent to attack republicanism and democracy and to support the royalist cause.
Lemaitre was elected to the French Academy in 1895.