Barbey D'Aurevilly, Jules (1808-89). An important precursor of the late 19th-c. French Catholic Revival, converted in 1846-7, Barbey carried forward into the post- Commune generation the dark Romantic inheritance of Baudelaire and his anti-democratic dandy pose. Huysmans, Péladan, and Bloy were all influenced by his extreme right-wing journalism and criticism (published in, for example, Le Pays, L'Éclair, Le Constitutionnel) and especially by his prose fiction. His major novels, exercises in sadistic melodrama tricked out, post-conversion, with the thrills of blasphemous transgression, include L'Amour impossible (1841), Une vieille maîtresse (1851), L'Ensorcelée (1854), and Un prêtre marié (1865). The short-story collection Les Diaboliques, prosecuted by the police on first publication in 1874, enjoyed a succès de scandale when reissued with nine plates by the engraver Félicien Rops in 1886.

[Jennifer Birkett]

(zhül ämādā' bärbā' dōrvēyē') , 1808–89, French writer and critic. An aristocrat and monarchist, he supported himself by journalism; his output of critical and polemical articles was enormous. He favored Balzac, early admired Baudelaire, and harshly criticized naturalism. His novels and stories, set in his native Cotentin, are notable portrayals of provincial life and tragic struggle. Perhaps best remembered is Les Diaboliques (1874, tr. 1925), hallucinatory tales with a satanic motif.