PIGAULT-LEBRUN, Charles Antoine Guillaume, sometimes called Pigault de l’Épinoy (1753-1835), the chief fiction writer of the first empire, and the most popular light novelist of France before Paul de Kock, was born at Calais (he is said to have traced his pedigree on the mother’s side to Eustache de St Pierre) on April 8, 1753. His youth was decidedly stormy. He twice carried off young ladies of some position, and was in consequence twice imprisoned by lettre de cachet. His first love, a Miss Crawford, the daughter of an English merchant whose office Pigault had entered, died almost immediately after her elopement; the second, Mademoiselle de Salens, he married. Besides his commercial and criminal experiences, he was a soldier in the queen’s guards, an actor, and a teacher of French. At the breaking out of the great war he re-enlisted and fought at Valmy. It should be said, however, that the romantic incidents of his life are differently related by different authorities, and are open to not a little suspicion. Although he had tried dramatic writing, he does not seem to have attempted prose fiction till he was forty, but from that time he was a fertile writer of novels for nearly thirty years. In his old age he took to graver work, and executed an abridgment of French history in eight volumes, besides some other work. His Oeuvres Complètes were published in twenty volumes between 1822 and 1824. He died on July 24, 1835. Pigault’s numerous novels, though still occasionally reprinted, are not much read; and none of them is much better or worse than any other. Their style is insignificant, and their morality very far from severe. But Pigault deserves the credit, such as it is, of being almost the first writer of numerous light novels calculated to hit, and which ...