The Notebooks of Champfleury

JEAN P. HYTIER
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD T. ARNDT
 

I
 

/" ]f ~M HE, LIBRARY of Columbia University acquired in Sep¬
tember 1949 seven thick notebooks which belonged to
the French writer Champfleury, whose works are hardly
read today but whose name remains indissolubly connected with
the history of realism. The notebooks provide a wealth of informa¬
tion to be exploited concerning Champfleury's career as a novelist,
his methods of work, the customs and manners of his time (es¬
pecially those of the petty bourgeoisie and of artisans), and oc¬
casionally concerning famous or well-known contemporaries.

Champfleury, born in 1821 at Laon with the name of Jules Hus-
son, received an inadequate education which he tried to complete
with the abundant readings of a self-taught man. He had tlie needy
youth of an ill-paid scribbler which a curious mixture of bohemian
life and bourgeois temperament characterizes. He knew fame
from the time when he was considered, too generously, as the
Courbet of literature—because he had come to the defence of the
painter of The Burial at Ornans; because in 1857 he had given to
a collection of articles the then aggressive title of Realism (about
which he himself, however, had many reservations); finally be¬
cause he had tried to carry out, in some ten well-selling novels,'
his ratlier \ague program of "sincerity in art," which was ill-served
by a dull and somewhat faulty style. .Most honestly, he put into his
stories only what he had seen personally (although he augmented
his own observations somewhat by "documentation," a practice

^ Les Avevtines de Mile. Mariette, Les Soiiffraiices de M. le Professenr Delteil
(1853), Les BoKrgeou de Moliiichart {1854), Monsieur de Boisdbyver, La Succes¬
sion LeCaimts (1856), Les Ainoureux de Sahite-Perine (1858), La Mascarade de
la vie parlsieime (1859), Le Violoii de faience (186 r), Les J^enwiselles Touran^eau
(1863).

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