KOCK, CHARLES PAUL DE (1793-1871), French nov elist, was born at Passy (Paris). He was a posthumous child, his father, a banker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock lived on the Boulevard St. Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians. He died in Paris on April 27, 1871. 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 Pen dennis's remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for 3o years except Paul de Kock, 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 nouv elles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock?" The disappearance of
the grisette and of the cheap dissipation described by Henri Mur ger 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 19th century at Paris still has its value. With the exception of a few not very felicitous excursions into historical romance and some miscellaneous works of which his share in La Grande ville, Paris (1842), is the chief, all his books are stories of middle-class Parisian life, of guinguettes and cabarets and various equivocal adventures. The most famous are André le Savoyard (1825) and Le Barbier de Paris (5826).