Paul-Jean Toulet was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

, novelist and feuilleton

Feuilleton

Feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles...

 writer.

Life and works

Paul-Jean Toulet was a descendant of Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont , known to history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed under the guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible, through his role as a politician and...

, and son of a wealthy man living in Mauritius

Mauritius

Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...

. He was most famous for his opus describing La vie parisienne.

In France, he is mostly famous for a book of verse, Les Contrerimes (Counterrimes). The book was published posthumously but many pieces had been incorporated in his novels or published in literary magazines from 1910 to 1914. Toulet became a model or an inspirator to the fantaisist poetic movement from 1911 until the war. This explains the following comment made on the reception of his works : "When two men who have read Jean Paul Toulet meet (usually in a bar), they immediately imagine it's a certain form of aristocracy."

In 1897, Toulet received a copy of The Great God Pan

The Great God Pan

"The Great God Pan" is a novella written by Arthur Machen. A version of the story was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication in 1894...

 by Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror...

 from a friend and he translated it the following year. It was finally published in Le Plume in 1901 and then again by it, yet went unnoticed, except for Maeterlinck's

Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...

reaction "... combining the traditional and scientific fantastic genres, it hits both our memories and hopes". Toulet engaged a correspondence with Machen and visited him in London.

Toulet's own novel Pan du Paur'was inspired by Machen. Published in 1898 by Simonis Empris, it wasn't successful either. In 1918, however, it was published again by the Éditions du Divan. This publishing company was owned by Toulet's admirer Henri Martineau who also led a correspondence with the author.

External links

• Les Contrerimes (e-text, in French)