Albert Patin de La Fizelière


Albert de La Fizelière was a French littérateur, writer on electoral and constitutional law, art critic, and historian, known for his friendship with Champfleury and for his ties to the Café Guerbois circle. He was described by Edmond Antoine Poinsot as one "of the small number of our learned men who are both spiritual and without pedantry". He was a friend of Baudelaire and published the first bibliography of the latter a year after his death.
To the general public he is known for his dictum that "the public generally prefers a gibe to a word and a buffoon to a comedian", which had been anthologized in dictionaries of French quotations from 1840 onwards.

Life and works

His earliest publication in book form seems to have been an elaboration of the popular historical work, Abrégé chronologique de l'histoire de France... of Charles-Jean-François Hénault, which was issued in 1842 as "updated to the present times" by "Ludovic G. de Marsay". He was the editor of the art magazine Bulletin de l'Ami des arts, of the Journal de l'album des théâtres, of La Petite Revue, and of the weekly foreigners' guide to Paris, the Gazette parisienne. Many of his art reviews that appeared in the magazine L'Artiste were subsequently reprinted as independent brochures. La Fizelière was the founder of the magazine Notre Histoire in 1848.
He was an admirer of the work of Charles Nodier, whose obituary he published in the Bulletin de l'Ami des arts of 30 January 1844, having been instrumental in bringing his Franciscus Columna to print posthumously in the same year. Some years later he would publish Nodier's correspondence with Alphonse Martainville.
In 1855 La Fizelière married the fifteen-year-old Sara Bouclier, whose beauty, grace and spirit had already attracted an entourage of suitors before her marriage to La Fizelière, and who would go on to become at his side a translator of English literature into the French language. Her portrait executed by Charles-Émile-Callande de Champmartin in 1845 when Sara Bouclier was 6-years' old and preserved today at the Musée national du château de Compiègne, is an ample testimony to her assets, both physical and intellectual.
In the latter part of his life he edited the 12-volume Œuvres diverses of Jules Janin.
He edited and published literary monuments of the regional dialects of France, such as the hitherto unpublished 17th-century Dialogue de Thoinette et d'Alizon in the Lorrain dialect, and several pieces in the Franco­phone dialect of Metzgau.
His publications in the field of art history include an essay on Vivant Denon, and another on Antoine Chintreuil.
La Fizelière's caricature was drawn by the famous artist :fr:Nadar|Nadar towards the middle of the century, in which La Fizelière is called "Lafiselière". Four months after his death his personal library was dispersed in a public sale, while his manuscripts and his art collection went on sale five months later.

Works

1840s