Charles Victor Cherbuliez (1829-99) was a Swiss, then French, novelist and author, born in Geneva. Descended from a family of Protestant refugees, in adulthood in 1879 he resumed his French nationality, taking advantage of an act passed in the early days of the Revolution. His early education was in Geneva, then in Paris, after which he studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. On his return to Geneva he took up teaching and after his resumption of French citizenship he was elected a member of the Academie francaise in 1881. Having received the Legion d'honneur in 1870, he was promoted to be officer of the order in 1892. Cherbuliez was a prolific and successful writer of fiction, most of whose novels appeared first in serial form in the Revue des deux mondes, to which he also contributed a number of political and learned articles, usually printed under the pseudonym G Valbert. Several collections of these non-fiction pieces, admired for both their style and content, were published from the 1870s-90s, alongside his output of novels. Samuel Bruhl and Company, a delicately comedic romantic adventure, was first published in the original French in 1877 and is reprinted from an English translation.