Paul Henri Corentin Féval
BiographyPaul Henri Corentin Féval (September 29, 1816–March 8, 1887) was a French novelist and dramatist most famous for writing Jean Diable (1862) and being one of the fathers of modern crime fiction. Jean Diable was arguably the first modern detective novel. By his contemporaries, Féval was considered the equal of Dumas and Sue.
Born at the Hôtel de Blossac in Rennes in Brittany in 1816, Féval was educated for the bar and became a full-fledged lawyer in 1836. However, he soon moved to Paris where he gained a footing in the literary world by the publication of his novel Le Club des phoques (1841) in the Revue de Paris, which was soon followed by three more swashbucklers: Rollan Pied de Fer (1842), Les Chevaliers du Firmament (1843), and Le Loup Blanc, (1843) the latter of which features a heroic albino who fights for justice in a Zorro-like disguise, one of the earliest treatments of a crimefighter with a secret identity.
Féval's break came with Les Mystères de Londres (1844), a sprawling feuilleton (serial story) written to cash in on the success of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris. In it, Irishman Fergus O’Breane tries to avenge the wrongs of his countrymen by seeking the annihilation of England. The plot anticipates by one year that of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The novel also features a Mafia-like criminal secret society called the Gentlemen of the Night, a theme that will become recurrent in Féval’s oeuvre. Féval published the series under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trollop.
In 1865, Féval wrote La Vampire, a seminal text featuring the perversely charismatic Countess Addhema, the first and foremost prototype of the female vampire-as-libido-run-wild theme. Some scholars claimed the text was initially penned in 1856, over 40 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
His masterpiece was Les Habits Noirs, a sprawling criminal saga written over a twelve-year period comprising eleven novels. He retroactively incorporated Les Mystères de Londres, Les Compagnons du Silence (itself a sequel to an earlier work, Bel Demonio) and Jean Diable into the chronology, creating a veritable human comedy of evil and secret conspiracies.
In 1875, after being bankrupted by a financial scandal related to the Ottoman Empire, Féval became a born-again Christian and stopped writing crime novels, now considering them sinful, thereby leaving Les Habits Noirs uncompleted. He even tried to acquire the rights to previous crime novels for the purpose of re-writing them, and also started writing religious-themed novels. He was ruined financially again in 1882, this time the victim of an embezzler, possibly contributing to the stroke which paralyzed him the same year. His son, Paul Féval (1860–1933), carried on in his father’s footsteps, becoming a prolific writer in his own right and writing some sequels to his father’s novels.
Bibliography
Le Club des phoques (1841)
Rollan Pied de Fer (1842)
Les Chevaliers du Firmament (1843)
Le Loup Blanc (1843)
Les Amours de Paris (The Loves of Paris) (1845)
La Fée des Grèves (1850)
Le Livre des Mystères (1852)
Le Tueur de Tigres (1853)
La Louve (1855)
L’Homme de Fer (1856)
La Chambre des Amours (1856)
Le Bossu (Lagardére; or, The Hunchback of Paris) (1857)
Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860, vampire novel)
La Fille du Juif Errant (1863)
La Vampire (1865, vampire novel)
La Ville Vampire (1874, vampire novel)
La Première Aventure de Corentin Quimper (1876, religious-themed)
Pierre Blot (1877, religious-themed)
Les Habits Noirs:
Les Mystères de Londres (Gentlemen of the Night) (1844, as Sir Francis Trollop)
Bel Demonio (1850)
Les Compagnons du Silence (The Companions of Silence) (1857)
Jean Diable (John Devil) (1862)
Les Habits Noirs (The Black Coats) (1863)
Cœur d'Acier (Heart of Steel) (1865)
L’Avaleur de Sabre (The Sword Swallower) (1867)
La Rue de Jerusalem (Jerusalem Street) (1868)
L’Arme Invisible (The Invisible Weapon) (1869)
Les Compagnons du Trésor (The Companions of the Treasure) (1870)
La Bande Cadet (The Cadet Gang) (1875)