Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget was a French novelist and critic who was a master of the psychological novel and a molder of opinion among French conservative intellectuals in the pre-World War I period. After completing his studies in philosophy, Bourget began his career as a poet, and several of his poems were set to music by Claude Debussy. Encouraged and deeply influenced by the critic Hippolyte Taine, he published a series of essays tracing the sources of contemporary pessimism to the works of Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Taine, and Ernest Renan. Fashionable in their day because of their…