Background
Gautier was born on August 30, 1811 in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département, France. His father was Pierre Gautier, a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde.
(First published in 1836, this novella by best-selling aut...)
First published in 1836, this novella by best-selling author Théophile Gautier tells the story of a priest named Romuald who falls in love with Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire.
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critic dramatist journalist novelist poet
Gautier was born on August 30, 1811 in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département, France. His father was Pierre Gautier, a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde.
Gautier studied at Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (fellow alumni include Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and the Marquis de Sade), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness.
From 1830 onward Gautier was productive in poetry, novels, short stories, criticism, and travel sketches.
He is the great apostle of "art for art's sake.
"In February 1830, Gautier was the most brilliant of the young men supporting Victor Hugo against the classical critics; the scarlet doublet which he wore at the premiè repremiere of Hugo's Hernani has become legendary.
Rejecting the romantic ideal of grandiose nature, he rejected likewise its ideal love.
Rarely a creator but always an impeccable craftsman, Gautier gave a much needed corrective to the undisciplined style of the romantics.
Unfortunately, Gautier's verse does not have emotional or intellectual content equal to its perfection of form.
É mauxEmaux et Camé esCamees (1852) is his best and most characteristic collection.
It includes the famous Art, in which Gautier sets up technical difficulty as a prime requirement of art.
Thus his long novel Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863) is a rehandling of the 17th-century Roman comique of Paul Scarron.
Gautier's prose works include also the posthumously published Histoire du romantisme (1874).
(First published in 1836, this novella by best-selling aut...)
The ballerina Carlotta Grisi, was the great love of Gautier's life. She could not return his affection, so he married her sister Ernestina, a singer.