Descaves, Lucien (1861-1949). French novelist. A disciple of Huysmans and of the Goncourt brothers and a practitioner of écriture artiste, he was an exponent of Naturalism, whose tendencies he took to extremes in novels such as Le Calvaire d'Héloïse Pajadou (1883) and Une vieille rate (1883), yet he was one of the signatories of the ‘Manifesto of the Five’ against Zola's La Terre. The scandal provoked by his anti-military novel, Sous-Offs (1889), made him famous. Though acquitted of charges of offending the army and public morality, he was stripped of his military rank.
[David Baguley]
