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Charles NodierCharles Nodier (April 29, 1780 - January 27, 1844), was a French author. He was born at Besanon. His father, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, was appointed mayor of Besanon and consequently chief police magistrate; he seems to have become an instrument of the tyranny of the Jacobins without sharing their principles; but his son was for a time an ardent citizen, and is said to have been a Jacobin Club member at the age of twelve. In 1793 Charles saved the life of a lady guilty of sending money to an emigr, declaring to his father that if she were condemned he would take his own life. He was sent to Strasbourg, where he lived in the house of Eulogius Schneider, the notorious Jacobin governor of Alsace, but a good Greek scholar. During the Reign of Terror his father put him under the care of Girod de Chautrans, with whom he studied English and German. His love of books began very early, and he combined with it a strong interest in nature. He became librarian in his native town, but his exertions in the cause of suspected persons brought him under suspicion. An inspection of his papers by the police, however, revealed nothing more dangerous than a dissertation on the antennae of Insects. Entomology continued to be a favourite study with him, but he varied it with philology and pure literature and even political writing. For a skit on Napoleon, in 1803, he was imprisoned for some months. He then left Paris, where he had gone after losing his position at Besanon, and for some years lived a very unsettled life at Besanon, Dole, where he married, and in other places in the Jura. During these wanderings he wrote Le peintre de Salzbourg, journal des motions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Meditations du clotre (1803). The hero, Charles, who is a variation of the Werther type, desires the restoration of the monasteries, to afford a refuge from the woes of the world. In 1811 Nodier appears in Ljubljana, then the seat of Illyrian provinces, as editor of a polyglot journal, the Illyrian Telegraph (Tlgraph officiel) published in French, German, Italian and Slovenian. On the evacuation of the Illyrian provinces he returned to Paris, and the restoration found him a royalist, though he retained something of republican sentiment. In 1824 he was appointed to the librarianship of the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal. He was elected a member of the Acadmie franaise in 1833, and made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1843, a year before his death. The twenty years at the arsenal were by far the most important and fruitful of Nodier's life. He had the advantage of a settled home in which to collect and study rare books; and he was able to supply a centre and rallying place to a knot of young literary men of greater individual talent than himself--the so-called Romanticists of 1830--and to colour their tastes and work very decidedly with his own predilections. Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve all acknowledged their obligations to him. He was a passionate admirer of Goethe and of Shakespeare, and had himself contributed to the personal literature that was one of the leading traits of the Romantic school. His best and most characteristic work, some of which is exquisite in its kind, consists partly of short tales of a more or less fantastic character, partly of nondescript articles, half bibliographic, half narrative, the nearest analogue to which in English is to be found in some of the papers of Thomas de Quincey. The best examples of the latter are to be found in the volume entitled Mlanges tirs d'une petite bibliothque, published in 1829 and afterwards continued. Of his tales the best are Smarra, ou les dmons de la nuit (1821); Trilby, ou le lutin d'Argail (1822); Histoire du roi de Bohme et de ses sept chteaux (1830); La Fe aux miettes (1832); Ins de las Sierras (1838); Les quatre talismans et la lgende de soeur Batrix (1838), together with some fairy stories published in the year of his death, and Franciscus Columna, which appeared after it. The Souvenirs de jeunesse (1832) are interesting but untrustworthy, and the Dictionnaire universel de la langue franaise (1823), which, in the days before Littr, was one of the most useful of its kind, is said to have been not wholly or mainly Nodier's. There is a so-called collection of Œuvres compltes, in 12 vols. (1832), but at that time much of the author's best work had not appeared, and it included but a part of what was actually published. Nodier found an indulgent biographer in Prosper Merime on the occasion of the younger man's admission to the academy. An account of his share in the Romantic movement is to be found in Georg Brandes's Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. His Description raisonne d'une jolie collection de livres (1844), which is a catalogue of the books in his library, contains a life by Francis Wey and a complete bibliography of his numerous works. See also Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littraires, vol. ii.; Prosper Merime, Portraits historiques et littraires (1874); and A Estignard, Correspondance indite de Charles Nodier, 1796-1844 (1876), containing his letters to Charles Weiss. Reference Nodier, Charles Nodier, Charles Nodier, Charles Nodier, Charles
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