Louis Énault (1824 - 28 March 1900) was a French journalist, novelist and translator. He sometimes used the pseudonym Louis de Vernon.

Life

Born in Isigny-sur-Mer, he trained as a lawyer in Paris and then, thanks to his links with the right-wing Legitimists, was arrested after the French Revolution of 1848. After his release he traveled in northern Europe and the Mediterranean, visiting Liguria in 1850 and giving a long description of Genoa's historic city centre in his travel journal Brève vision hivernale d'un voyageur normand. On his return to France in 1851, he was made a doctor of letters at Caen University after writing a thesis on Aeschylus.

Énault became a prominent man of letters, publishing fiction, nonfiction, and translations. He collaborated with Gustave Doré to produce an illustrated 1876 work on the industrial revolution in London, widely admired for the realism of its over 170 woodcuts and for its text, comparing London's architecture with the neoclassical monuments Énault had visited in Valletta on Malta during his travels on French medieval crusader routes. His translations into French included Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

He also wrote as an arts and literary critic for several publications including la Vie à la campagne, Le Nord (published in Belgium), Le Constitutionnel, La Gazette, Le Figaro and L'Illustration. In his "Chronique" column for La revue des jeux, des arts et du sport, Énault wrote a fiery rebuke of Émile Zola, occasioned by the production of a play based on Zola's novel l'Assommoir:

We must descend…to arrive at the thin personality of M. Zola, who would like to be the ox, but who is still only the frog.…L'Ambigu, who was never more comical, has just given us l'Assommoir.…It will perhaps mark the zenith of the most abject literary school [naturalism] that has ever held the attention of contemporaries. I do not think that her reign is long: disgust awaits her, and she will soon fall into it. M. Zola…who combines cynicism and platitude, sees in nature only the despicable and coarse. He prefers the polluted trickle of suburbs to the pure water of great lakes….He wallows voluptuously in all the turpitudes he cares to imagine, and drags his audience with him. This is a morbid case like scabies, like malignant and purulent pustules, or leprosy: it presents a case for the clinic, not the critic. We treat these people, but we don't talk about it in good company.…We have, in fact, too much respect for our readers to condemn them to an analysis of a piece like L'Assommoir.…These promiscuities without modesty and without love, these debauches without passion, these tableaux of rudeness thats revolt the delicate, these bad mores of the lowest order, without elegance, without grace and without varnish, these bouquets of poisonous plants growing on manure, would offer them only sadness without compensation.^[1]

In an open letter responding to Énault's diatribe, Émile Blavet identified Énault as the polar opposite of Zola: "You, my dear Énault, [are] the official painter of worldly elegance, the poet of veiled and delicate feelings, the historiographer of aristocratic adventures, the idealistic writer par excellence…."^[2]

Énault died in Paris. Celebrated in his lifetime but afterward little known, he is cited by Jules Romains as an example of a writer who knew notoriety and even glory but whose name meant nothing to the following generation.^[3]

Works

Travel writing

Young women near Glasgow, illustration by Gavarni for Angleterre, Écosse, Irlande, voyage pittoresque (A Picturesque Trip through England, Scotland and Ireland, 1859).

• Promenades en Belgique et sur les bords du Rhin (1852)
• La Terre-Sainte, voyage des quarante pèlerins en 1853 (1854) Texte en ligne
• Constantinople et la Turquie, tableau de l'Empire ottoman (1855)
• De Paris à Caen (1856)
• La Norvège (1857)
• Les Îles Hébrides (1858)
• La Vierge du Liban (1858)
• Angleterre, Écosse, Irlande, voyage pittoresque (1859)
• De Paris à Cherbourg, itinéraire historique et descriptif (1859)
• Nadèje (1859)
• Alba (1860) online version
• Histoire de la littérature des Hindous (1860)
• L'Inde pittoresque (1861)
• Frantz Müller [collaboration with Auguste de Châtillon] suivi du Rouet d'or et de Axel (1862) online version
• En province (1863)
• La Méditerranée, ses îles et ses bords (1863)
• L'Amérique centrale et méridionale (1867) Texte en ligne
• Londres, illustrated by Gustave Doré (1876)
• Après la mort. L'Enfer d'après des doctrines danoises et anglaises (1888)

References

Sources

• "Biographical Notice" in Le chien du capitaine by Louis Enault, Toronto: The W.J. Gage Company, undated, pp. v-vi.
• Chamberlain, A.F. "Sketch of Énault's Life and Works" in Le chien du capitaine by Louis Enault, Toronto: W.J. Gage & Co., 1890, pp. 1-2.
• Fontaine, C. Preface, Le chien du capitaine by Louis Enault, Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1903, pp. 3-4.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Louis Énault.

• Book review of Énault's Un Amour en Laponie in The North American Review, Oct., 1862.