BOURGET, PAUL CHARLES JOSEPH French novelist and critic, was born at Amiens on Sept. 2, 1852 the son of a teacher of mathematics. He received his early educa tion at Clermont-Ferrand, and afterwards studied at the lycee Louis-le-Grand and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. In 1872– 1873 he produced a volume of verse, Au bond de la mer, which was followed by others, the last, Les Aveux, appearing in 1882. Meanwhile he was making a name in literary journalism, and in 1883 he published Essais de psycliologie contemporaine, studies of eminent writers first printed in the Nouvelle Revue, and now brought together. In 1884 Bourget paid a long visit to England, and there wrote his first published story (L'Irreparable). Cruelle Enigme followed in 1885; and Andre Cornelis (1886) and Men songes (1887) were received with much favour. Le Disciple (1889) showed the novelist in a graver attitude; while in 1891 Sensations d'Italie, notes of a tour in that country, revealed a fresh phase of his powers. In the same year appeared the novel Coeur de femme, and Nouveaux Pastels, types of the characters of men, the sequel to a similar gallery of female types (Pastels, 1890) . His later novels include La Terre promise (1892) ; Cosmo polis (1892), a psychological novel, with Rome as a background; Une Idylle tragique (1896) ; La Duchesse bleue (1897) ; Le Fantome (1901), Les Deux Soeurs (1905) ; and some volumes of shorter stories—Complications sentimentales (1896), the powerful Drarnes de famille (1898), Un Homme fort (1900), L'Etape (1902), a study of the inability of a family raised too rapidly from the peasant class to adapt itself to new conditions. This powerful study of contemporary manners was followed by Un Divorce (1904), a defence of the Roman Catholic position that divorce is a violation of natural laws, any breach of which inevitably entails disaster and by L'Esnigre (1907). Etudes et portraits, first pub lished in 1888, contains impressions of Bourget's stay in England and Ireland, especially of the months he spent at Oxford; and Outre-Mer (1895) is his critical journal of a visit to the United States in 1893. He was admitted to the Academy in Bourget dramatized his novel Un Divorce, and wrote other dramas, among which may be noted La Barricade (1910) and Le Tribun, described in the subtitle as Chroniques de 1910 et 1911. In these two plays he sought to portray the socio-political history of the time. But the form of drama did not permit of the analysis of emotion and of character in which Bourget was a master. He wrote some war-novels, but of his later works the greatest is un doubtedly the novel Le demon du midi (1914), which is a worthy successor of Le Disciple, and, like it, an invaluable contemporary historical document. Bourget's reputation as a novelist has long been assured. Deeply impressed by the singular art of Henry Beyle (Stendhal), he struck out on a new course at a moment when the realist school reigned without challenge in French fiction. His idealism, moreover, had a character of its own. It was con structed on a scientific basis, and aimed at an exactness, different from, yet comparable to, that of the writers who were depicting with an astonishing faithfulness the environment and the actions of a person or a society. With Bourget observation was mainly directed to the secret springs of human character. At first his purpose seemed to be purely artistic, but when Le Disciple ap peared, in 1889, the preface to that remarkable story revealed in him an unsuspected fund of moral enthusiasm which steadily developed as the years passed.
See also C. Lecigne, L'Evolution morale et religieuse de M. Paul Bourget (1903) ; F. J. verite psych,log aue et morale dans les romans de P. Bourget (1912) . His Oeuvres completes began to appear in a uniform edition in