BANVILLE, THEODORE FAULLAIN DE (1823 1891), French poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Moulins in the Bourbonnais, on March 14, 1823, and died in Paris on March 15, 1891. In 1842 he published his first volume of verse (Les Cariatides), which was followed by Les Stalactites in 1846. The poems won for their author the approbation and friendship of Alfred de Vigny and Jules Janin. He printed other volumes of verse, among which the Odes funambulesques (Alencon, received unstinted praise from Victor Hugo, to whom they were dedicated. Later, several of his comedies in verse were produced at the Theatre Francais and on other stages; and from onwards a stream of prose flowed from his industrious pen, in cluding studies of Parisian manners, sketches of well-known per sons (Camees parisiennes, etc.), and a series of tales (Contes bourgeois, Contes lieroiques, etc.), most of which were repub lished in his collected works (1875-78). He also wrote freely for reviews, and acted as dramatic critic for more than one newspaper. Throughout a life spent mainly in Paris, Banville's genial character and cultivated mind won him the friendship of the chief men of letters of his time. Banville's claim to remem brance rests mainly on his poetry. A careful and loving student of the finest models, he did even more than his greater and somewhat older comrades, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Theophile Gautier, to free French poetry from the fetters of metre and mannerism in which it had limped from the days of Malherbe. In the Odes funambulesques and elsewhere he revived with perfect grace and understanding the rondeau and the villa nelle, and like Victor Hugo in Les Orientales, wrote pantoums (pantuns) after the Malay fashion. He published in 1872 a Petit traite de versification f rancaise in exposition of his metrical methods. He was a master of delicate satire and used with much effect the difficult humour of sheer bathos, happily adapted by him from some of the early folk-songs.
Among his other works may be mentioned the poems, Idylles prussiennes (1871), and Trente-six ballades joyeuses (1875) ; the prose tales, Les Saltimbanques (1853) ; Esquisses parisiennes (1859) and Coates f eeriques; and the plays, Le Feuilleton d'Aris tophane (1852) Gringoire (i866), and Deidamia (1876).
See also J. Lemaitre, Les Contemporains (1st series, 1885) ; Sainte Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. xiv.; Maurice Spronck, Les Artistes litteraires (5889) ; J. Charpentier, Th. de Banville (5925).