LEMONNIER, ANTOINE LOUIS CAMILLE 1913), Belgian poet, was born at Ixelles, Brussels, on March 1844, and died at Brussels on June 13, 1913. He studied law, and then took a clerkship in a government office, which he resigned after three years. He retired to Namur, and developed the intimate sympathy with nature which informs his best work. Nos Flamands (1869) and Croquis d'automne (187o) date from this time. Paris-Berlin (187o), a pamphlet pleading the cause of France, and full of the author's horror of war, had a great suc cess. His capacity as a novelist, in the fresh, humorous descrip tion of peasant life, was revealed in Un Coin de village (1879). In Un Male (1881) he achieved a different kind of success. It deals with the amours of a poacher and a farmer's daughter, with the forest as a background. Cachapres, the poacher, seems the very embodiment of the wild life around him. The rejection of Un Male by the judges for the quinquennial prize of literature in 1883 made Lemonnier the centre of a school, inaugurated at a banquet given in his honour on May 27, 1883. Le Mort (1882), which describes the remorse of two peasants for a murder they have committed, is a masterpiece in its vivid representation of terror. After 1885 he turned aside from local subjects for some time to produce a series of psychological novels, books of art criticism, etc., assimilating more closely to French contemporary literature.
The most striking of Lemonnier's later novels are : L'Hysterique (1885) ; Happe-chair (1886), often compared with Zola's Ger minal; Le Possede (1890) ; La Fin des bourgeois (1892) ; L' Arche, journal d'une maman (1894), a quiet book, quite different from his usual work; La Faute de Mme Charvet (1895) ; L'Homme en amour (1897); and, with a return to Flemish subjects, Le Vent dans les moulins (190 1) ; Petit Homme de Dieu (1902), and Comme va le ruisseau (1903). In 1888 Lemonnier was prosecuted
in Paris for offending against public morals by a story in Gil Bias, and was condemned to a fine. In a later prosecution at Brussels he was defended by Edmond Picard, and acquitted; and he was arraigned for a third time, at Bruges, for his L'Homme en amour, but again acquitted. He represents his own case in Les Deux consciences (1902). L'Ile vierge (1897) was the first of a trilogy to be called La Legende de la vie, which was to trace, under the fortunes of the hero, the pilgrimage of man through sorrow and sacrifice to the conception of the divinity within him. In Adam et Ave (1899), and Au Coeur frais de la foret (1900), he preached the return to nature as the salvation not only of the individual but of the community. Among his other more important works are G. Courbet, et ses oeuvres (1878) ; L'Histoire des Beaux-Arts en Belgique 1830-1887 (1887) ; En Allemagne (1888), dealing especially with the Pinakothek at Munich; La Belgique (1888), an elaborate descriptive work with many illustrations; La Vie beige (1905) ; Alfred Stevens et son oeuvre ; L'Ecole beige de la peinture (1906).
Lemonnier spent much time in Paris, and was one of the early contributors to the Mercure de France. He began to write at a time when Belgian letters lacked style; and with much toil, and some initial extravagances, he created a medium for the expression of his ideas. He explained something of the process in a preface contributed to Gustave Abel's Labeur de la prose (1902). His prose is magnificent and sonorous, but abounds in neologisms and strange metaphors.
See L. Bazalgette, Camille Lemonnier (1904) ; Rency, Camille Lemonnier (1922).