Champfleury was a central figure in the mid-nineteenth-century controversy over realism in literature and in the fine arts. He was at once a theoretician, a regional novelist, an art critic, an art historian, a remarkable collector, and much else besides. His friends included Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré Daumier, and Henri Monnier, and his own origins were in la bohème (the bohemian world).

Jules-François-Félix Husson, born in Laon on 17 September 1821, was the son of a minor civil servant whose wife was in the grocery business. A difficult schoolboy, he removed himself to Paris at the age of seventeen to work for a bookseller, taking his first step in the direction of Parisian bohemia. He there encountered the painter Antoine Chintreuil, like himself un commis-libraire (bookseller's clerk); the brothers Joseph and Leopold Desbrosses, who founded the Société des Buveurs...