René Boylesve

René Boylesve (born April 14, 1867, La Haye-Descartes, France—died Jan. 14, 1926, Paris) was a French novelist noted for his social histories set in the Touraine region of west-central France from 1870 to 1900.

Boylesve was educated in Poitiers, Tours, and Paris. His studies of both liberal and fine arts, of science, and of law did not lead to his entering a profession. After 10 years in unimportant jobs, he wrote, under his mother’s maiden name, his first novel, Le Médecin des dames de Néans (1894; “The Doctor of the Ladies of Néans”), in which the essential Boylesve is already to be found and which anticipated Marcel Proust in style. Other books followed, and then came the powerful series known as the romans tourangeaux (“novels of Touraine”)—Mademoiselle Cloque (1899), La Becquée (1901; Daily Bread), L’Enfant à la balustrade (1903; The Child at the Balustrade), La Jeune Fille bien élevée (1909; “The Well Brought-Up Girl”), and others. In these works, notable for their studies of provincial personality and for their richly detailed style, Boylesve utilized a characteristic irony to chronicle the triumph of conventional values over artistic and spiritual aspirations. Boylesve was elected to the French Academy in 1918.