En Quarantaine

Émile Souvestre (1806 - 1854) was a French novelist who was a native of Morlaix, Finistère. He was the son of a civil engineer and was educated at the college of Pontivy, with the intention of following his father's career by entering the Polytechnic School. However, his father died in 1823 and he matriculated as a law student at Rennes but soon devoted himself to literature. He was by turns a bookseller's assistant, a private schoolmaster in Nantes, a journalist and a grammar school teacher in Brest and a teacher in Mulhouse. He settled in Paris in 1836. He began his literary career with a drama, played at the Théâtre français in 1828, the Siege de Missolonghi. This tragedy was a pronounced failure. In novel writing he did much better than for the stage, deliberately aiming at making the novel an engine of moral instruction. His first two novels L'Echelle de Femmes and Riche et Pauvre met with favorable receptions. His best work is to be found in the Derniers Bretons (4 vols., 1835-1837) and Foyer breton (1844), where the folk-lore and natural features of his native province are worked up into story form and in Un Philosophe sous les toils, which received in 1851 a well-deserved academic prize. He also wrote a number of other works-novels, dramas, essays and miscellanies.