Born into a working-class family, Alexis Bouvier began his professional life as a sculptor in bronze until 1863, while taking care to educate himself in order to fill gaps in his poor formation.

His early works are short stories depicting street scenes or workshops, folk songs and operettas for neighboring theaters and singing cafes.

Literary realism was then in vogue and Alexis Bouvier wrote dramatic short stories that allowed him to tell about social misery and the lives of the unhappy and disinherited he knew.

To support himself and complete his meager profits, he sold lemonade on the boulevard de Strasbourg, and it is on a table corner between two operettas and dramatic short stories that he wrote his first serialized novel.

When Villemessant, bored with his uniform and related to mourning stories suspended their publication in Le Figaro, Alexis Bouvier started publishing his serialized novels in five-cents newspapers.