Kock, Charles Paul De
KOCK, CHARLES PAUL DE (1793-1871), French novelist, was born at Passy on the 21st of May 1793. He was a posthumous child, his father, a banker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians. He died in Paris on the 27th of April 1871. He began to write for the stage very early, and composed many operatic libretti. His first novel, L' Enfant de ma femme (1811), was published at his own expense. In 1820 he began his long and successful series of novels dealing with Parisian life with Georgette, ou la mere du Tabellion. His period of greatest and most successful activity was the Restoration and the early days of Louis Philippe. He was relatively less popular in France itself than abroad, where he was considered as the special painter of life in Paris. Major Pendennis's remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for thirty years except Paul de Kock, " who certainly made him laugh," is likely to remain one of the most durable of his testimonials, and may be classed with the legendary question of a foreign sovereign to a Frenchman who was paying his respects, " Vous venez de Paris et vous devez savoir des nouvelles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock ? " The disappearance of the griselte and of the cheap dissipation described by Henri Murger practically made Paul de Kock obsolete. But to the student of manners his portraiture of low and middle class life in the first half of the igih century at Paris still has its value.
The works of Paul de Kock are very numerous. With the exception of a few not very felicitous excursions into historical romance and some miscellaneous works of which his share in La Grande mile, Paris (1842), is the chief, they are all stories of middle-class Parisian life, of guingueites and cabarets and equivocal adventures of one sort or another. The most famous are Andre le Savoyard (1825) and Le Barbier de Paris (1826).
His Memoires were published in 1873. See also Th. Trimm, La Vie de Charles Paul de Kock (1873).
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
