Renard, Jules (1864-1910). Author of prose fiction and plays. Bred in the countryside of central France, he became a man of letters, frequenting literary, artistic, and theatrical circles and contributing to contemporary journals ( Le Mercure de France, La Revue blanche). His one, indifferent book of poems, Les Roses (1886), was followed by the prose and plays on which his reputation as a minor classic rests. Drawing heavily on his observation of rural life in the provinces, he renders people with a wary, unsentimental, and tireless regard for truth, as in the character sketches of Le Vigneron dans sa vigne (1894) and his moving novel of an unhappy childhood, Poil de carotte (1894). He scrutinizes the world of nature—poppies, swallows, frogs—with a verbal precision and striking novelty of metaphor and simile that make us see them afresh. Such is the case with Histoires naturelles (1896), brilliantly illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard and set to music by Ravel. His plays punctiliously register human self-deception and pettiness and astringently expose them, as in Le Plaisir de rompre (1897), Le Pain de ménage (1898), La Bigote (1909). His Journal (posth., 1925-7) combines self-examination and a vivid picture of the belle époque.

— S. Beynon John

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.