Charles-Louis Philippe

He wrote to the bourgeois writer and politician Maurice Barrès... My grandmother was a beggar, my father, who was a proud child, begged before he was old enough to work for his bread.

Among his literary friends and admirers would be Paul Claudel, Léon-Paul Fargue, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Francis Jammes, Valery Larbaud.

He turned next to a fictionalised life of his father (Charles Blanchard), but abandoned what was to be a kind of hymn to work shortly before his sudden death, from meningitis, in December 1909.

L'Association internationale des Amis de Charles-Louis Philippe has existed since 1935 to promote knowledge of his life and work through an annual bulletin.

Although three novels, Bubu de Montparnasse, Le Père Perdrix and Marie Donadieu, have been published in English translations, all are long out of print.