Paul Bourget once enjoyed a reputation as the most brilliant French writer of his generation. He was not only prolific but also, in terms of official recognition, uniquely precocious. When he entered the Académie Française in 1895, he was the youngest novelist ever elected. By contrast, his present critical status excludes him even from the ranks of the second best. Not a single one of his hundred or so books remains in print; they lie unread on library shelves, barely dusted by attempts at scholarly rehabilitation undertaken since World War I. Even allowing for the fact that this has been the not-uncommon fate of Parisian intellectuals wrongly positioned in the Dreyfus Affair, Bourget's fall from grace has been indecently spectacular.

Charles-Joseph-Paul Bourget was born in Amiens on 2 September 1852, the son of Anne-Adèle Valentin and Justin Bourget. It was a heredity he would later...