Paul de Kock began to write very early, and continued to produce novels almost until the end of his long life. But his period of greatest and most successful activity was the Restoration and the early days of Louis Philippe. The comparative “patavinity” of his style, and the fact of his standing aloof from the whole innovating movement in literature as in politics, made him relatively less popular in France itself than abroad, where he was considered as the special painter of life in Paris. Major Pendennis’s remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for thirty years except Paul de Kock, “who certainly made him laugh,” is likely to remain one of the most durable of his testimonials, with as a companion the legendary question of a foreign sovereign to a Frenchman who was paying his respects, “Vous venez de Paris et vous devez savoir des nouvelles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock '?” The disappearance of the grisette and of the cheap dissipation which Murger pathetically laments in more than one of his works practically made Paul de Kock obsolete, and his want of style affected him as unfavourably as it did his dramatic analogue Scribe. But to the student of manners his vivid and by all accounts truthful portraiture of low and middle class life in the first half of the 18th century at Paris will never lose its value, and, though he can hardly be said to hold a high place in literature, he is a remarkable follower of Restif de la Bretonne, and may be said to be in a sense the last of the 18th century school of novelists.

It has been said that the works of Paul de Kock are very numerous. In the fullest list that we have seen they amount to about a hundred, some of them being decidedly voluminous. With the exception of a few not very felicitous excursions into the historical romance, they are all stories of middle class Parisian life, of guinguettes and cabarets and equivocal adventures of one sort or another. The most famous of all is Le Barbier de Paris, which has been translated into almost every European language. Of equal literary merit, and, considering the style, of singular freedom from objectionable characteristics, is André le Savoyard, a remarkable story, full of narrative power, and one of the happiest examples of the working up of simple and commonplace details into an interesting whole. A certain sameness pervades most of Paul de Kock’s work. It is almost untouched by the influences of the romantic movement, and has none of the strong sentiments of the school which derived from the author’s contemporary Balzac. But there is a good deal of human nature in it, a good deal of accurate observation, and an almost total absence of the revolting and the preposterous. Paul de Kock was the Charles de Bernard of low life, and greater praise of its kind could hardly be given to any writer.