Son of a haberdasher, member of a family of five children, he began his career teaching one year at the college in Avranches.
He became a student at the École pratique des hautes études in 1883, he subsequently received first at the agrégation of English in 1885.
He was less interested in literary theory, and instead focused, according to René Wellek (Histoire de la Critique littéraire, volume 3), on the interpretation and the Esprit du Poète .
In his Défense de la poésie française à l'usage des lecteurs anglais (1912), he championed French literature which, in his opinion, was under-valued by the English.
She married, in 1927, Georges Connes (1890–1974), also professor of English literature who became a famous Resistance fighter, politician, and brief predecessor of Canon Félix Kir as Mayor of Dijon in 1944 and 1945.