Marcel Schwob
[3] In addition to over a hundred short stories, he wrote journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays.
His family had just returned from Egypt, where his father had headed the cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ten years.
When the French Third Republic began, the Schwob family lived in Tours, where George became the director of the newspaper Le Républicain d'Indre-et-Loire.
In 1876, he moved to Nantes to direct the Republican daily Le Phare de la Loire; after he died in 1892, his eldest son Maurice, born in 1859, took his place.
For eight years he wrote short stories that were collected in six books: Cœur double ("Double Heart", 1891), Le roi au masque d'or ("The King in the Golden Mask", 1892), Mimes (1893), Le livre de Monelle ("The Book of Monelle", 1894), La croisade des enfants ("The Children's Crusade", 1896) and Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary Lives", 1896).
Along with Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté and Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage.
In the last eight years of his life Schwob was often too sick to work, but he managed to complete a number of projects, although with the exception of the play Jane Shore,[6] and "Dialogues d'Utopie" (written in 1905), he never wrote any more original fiction.
He did write articles, introductions and essays, adapted and translated several plays, and planned or began numerous projects that remained unfinished when he died.
Leaving from Marseilles, he stopped in Port Said, Djibouti, Aden, toured Sri Lanka, Sydney and finally Vailima, where Stevenson had lived.
He became very sick in the island, lost a lot of weight and was forced to return to Paris in a hurry without having visited the tomb.
He dedicated Le livre de Monelle to her, basing the central character on Louise, but turning her into a child of indeterminate age.
In 1894, the year after Louise's death, Schwob met Marguerite Moreno, who, at 23, had been named by Stéphane Mallarmé "the sacred muse of Symbolism",[9] and was the lover of Catulle Mendès.
She had posed for sculptor Jean Dampt, artists Edmond Aman-Jean, Joseph Granié and often for Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer.
[11][failed verification] In February 1905, after nine years of serious recurring episodes, he died at age 37, of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour, performing in Aix-en-Provence.
[4]: 328 Starting in December 1904 he taught a course on Villon at the École des hautes études that was attended by, among others, Michel Bréal, Édouard and Pierre Champion, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, Auguste Longnon, Pablo Picasso, Catherine Pozzi (daughter of one of his doctors), André Salmon and Louis Thomas.
It seems to have its origins in the book The Love that Dared Not Speak Its Name by H. Montgomery Hyde, in which he wrote that Schwob died from the "effects of a syphilitic tumor in the rectum, which he acquired as a result of anal intercourse with an infected youth.
