Maurice Talmeyr
Marie-Justin-Maurice Coste (17 March 1850 – 4 October 1931), better known as Maurice Talmeyr[1], was a French novelist, essayist and political journalist.
Contents
Biography
Born at Chalon-sur-Saône, in the Saône-et-Loire department, he did classical studies in Paris with the Jesuits, at the school of the Immaculate Conception on the Rue de Vaugirard, then enrolled in the Faculty of Law.
He began his career in the Parisian press as an editor of Le Peuple and then contributed to many daily newspapers — La Tribune, La France, Le Rappel, L'Intransigeant, Le Télégraphe, Le National, Gil Blas, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, Le Matin, La Croix — as well as to several magazines — La Revue Illustrée, La Revue Hebdomadaire, La Revue des Deux Mondes, La Revue de Paris — in which he wrote columns on literary, artistic, and political life.
Some of them provided him with material for books: biting social chronicles in Les Gens pourris, studies on the backstage of justice in Sur le banc and on the underbelly of society in Les Possédés de la morphine, investigations on slaughterhouses in La Cité du sang and on racing in Sur le turf, reports on apostolic circles in La Nouvelle légende dorée, heroic accounts of the Great War in his Portraits de la belle France. He also published several novels of naturalist inspiration, notably Le Grisou, which met with some success and was republished several times, as well as two books of memories.
As a member of the French Anti-Masonic League, he gave conferences in Paris and Brussels in which he tried to demonstrate that the French Revolution did not originate from a popular movement, but from a Masonic conspiracy, and that Freemasonry was itself the offspring of the ancient Knights Templar, of which it remains one of the last vestiges.
Maurice Talmeyr was a member of the Society of People of Letters and the Association des publicistes chrétiens. At the beginning of his career, he had frequented Victor Hugo's salon, who introduced him to literary circles and helped him to find his pen name. After having been a leftist boulangiste and close to Henri Rochefort, he had gradually rallied to the Action française.[2] During the Dreyfus Affair, he spoke out against the revision of the trial.
The French Academy awarded him the Monbinne Prize in 1925, 1927 and 1931.
He died in Saint-Saud-Lacoussière.
Works
- Victor Hugo. L'Homme qui rit. Quatrevingt-treize. Suivi de: Une après-midi chez Théophile Gautier (1874)
- Le Conte d'hiver (1878; with Alfred Gassier)
- Le Grisou (1880; novel)
- Une école de jésuites (1880)
- L'Aventure de Perdita (1882; with Alfred Gassier)
- Madame Alphonse (1884)
- Histoires joyeuses et funèbres (1886; illustrated by Ferdinand Lunel)
- Les Gens pourris (1886)
- Vierge sage (1886; novel)
- Le paysan et la paysanne pervertis (1888; illustrations by Jean Hée)
- Sur le banc, portraits d'audience (1890; 3 volumes)
- La Cormière. Un roi de Madagascar (1891; novel)
- Les Possédés de la morphine (1892)
- Entre mufles, comédie en 5 actes, Paris, Comédie-Parisienne, 28 décembre 1895 (1896)
- Album Forain (1896; illustrations by Jean-Louis Forain)
- L’Affaire des médecins (1897)
- Souvenirs de journalisme (1900)
- Tableaux du siècle passé. La Cité du sang. Un bourg de France. Le marchand de vins. Chez les verriers. L'école du Trocadéro. L'âge de l'affiche (1901; awarded the Montyon Prize by the Académie française)
- Sur le turf, Paris (1903)
- La franc-maçonnerie et la révolution française (1904)
- La Fin d'une société. Les maisons d'illusion (1906)
- Pour le salut de l'école libre. Conférence faite à Lyon, le 3 avril 1911, à la Société des études historiques et Littéraires (1912)
- L’Héroïsme pendant la guerre. Portraits de la belle France (1918; awarded the Sobrier-Arnould Prize by the Académie française)
- La Nouvelle légende dorée: La Paroisse des chiffonniers. Les Sœurs aveugles. La Bonne Mademoiselle Bonnefois. La Croix sur les eaux. Les Dames du Calvaire (1921; awarded the Dodo Prize in 1922 by the Académie française)
- La Ténébreuse Affaire La Roncière (1924)
- Souvenirs d'avant le déluge. 1870-1914 (1927)
- Souvenirs de la Comédie humaine (1929)
Notes
External links
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- 1850 births
- 1931 deaths
- 19th-century French journalists
- 20th-century French journalists
- 20th-century French memoirists
- 19th-century French novelists
- 19th-century French writers
- 20th-century French writers
- Catholicism and Freemasonry
- French political journalists
- Le Figaro people
- Members of the Ligue de la patrie française
- Pseudonymous writers
