RENE FRANCOIS AR MAND PRUDHOMME (1839-1907), French poet, born in Paris, March 16, 1839, was educated at the Lycee Bonaparte, where he took his degree as Bachelier es Sciences. An attack of ophthalmia interrupted his studies and necessitated an entire change in the course of his career. He found employment for a time in the Schneider factory at Creuzot, but he soon abandoned an occupation to which he was eminently unsuited. He subsequently entered a notary's office in Paris. It was during this period that he composed those early poems which were not long in acquiring celebrity among an ever-widening circle of friends. In 1865 he published his first volume of poems, which was favourably re viewed by Sainte-Beuve, to whose notice it had been brought by Gaston Paris. It was at this moment that the small circle of which Leconte de Lisle was the centre were preparing the Parnasse, to which Sully-Prudhomme contributed several pieces. In 1866 Lemerre published a new edition of the Stances et poemes and a collection of sonnets entitled Les Epreuves (i866). From this time forward Sully-Prudhomme devoted his life entirely to poetry. It was in the volume of Les Epreuves that the note of melancholy which was to dominate through the whole work of his life was first clearly discernible. In 1869 he published a trans lation of the first book of Lucretius with a preface, and Les Solitudes. In 1870 a series of domestic bereavements and a serious paralytic illness resulting from the strain and fatigue of the winter of 1870, during which he served in the Garde Mobile, shattered his health. In 1872 he published Les Ecuries d'Augias, Croquis italiens, Impressions de its guerre (1866-72) and Les Destins, La Revolte des heurs in 1874, in 1875 Les vaines Ten dresses, in 1878 La Justice, in 1886 Le Prisme, and in 1888 Le Bonheur. All these poems were collected and republished under
the title of Poesies, occupying four volumes of his Oeuvres (6 vols., 1883-1904). After the publication of Le Bonheur he practic ally ceased to produce verse, and devoted himself almost entirely to philosophy. He published two volumes of prose criticism L'ex pression dans les beaux arts (1884) and Re flexions sur Part des vers (1892). Various monographs by him appeared from time to time in the philosophical reviews, and among them a remarkable series of essays (Revue des deux mondes, Oct. isth, Nov. 15th, 1890) on Pascal, and a valuable study on the "Psychologie du libre arbitre" in the Revue de metaphysique et de morale (1906). He was elected to the Academy on the 8th of December 1881. On the loth of December 1901 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and devoted most of the money to the foundation of a prize for poetry to be awarded by the Societe des Bens de lettres. He was one of the earliest champions of Captain Dreyfus. In 1902 he wrote, in collaboration with Charles Richet, Le Prob leme des causes finales. During his later years he lived at Chate nay in great isolation, a victim of perpetual ill-health, and mainly occupied with his Vraie religion selon Pascal (1905). He had been partially paralysed for some time when he died suddenly on the 6th of September 1907. He left a volume of unpublished verse and a prose work, Le Lien social, which was a revision of an introduction which he had contributed to Michelet's La Bible de l'humanite. See C. Hemon, La Philosophic de Sully-Prud homme (1907), Sully-Prudhomme by E. Zyromski (Paris 1907).