René Martineau / Richard Robinson
The Biography of Léon Bloy: Memories of a Friend, published in 1921, is the official biography of Léon Bloy (1846-1917) by his friend, René Martineau. René Martineau and Léon Bloy were good friends for the last eighteen years of the latter writerʼs life.'The first time I met Léon Bloy was at the train station in Lagny, in 1901.' Lagny or Lagny-sur-Marne or, as Léon Bloy later put it, 'Cochons-sur-Marne' ('cochons' meaning 'pigs' in French). Bloy goes into day-after-day detail about the struggles he lived through there, in his published journal Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne (Quatre ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)... four grievous years in the artistʼs already grievous life. They were, in René Martineauʼs words, four years of '... unexpected contact of the most vulgar provincial villagers with the least common of French writers.'The biography continues to follow Bloy, after Lagny, in Montmartre and then Bourg-la-Reine, (outside of Paris), until his passing. It also covers Bloyʼs early years, based on information obtained from the writer himself, and his wife, Mme. Bloy, as well as from letters, and friends.It is as much a biography as a defense, or apologia, of the great writer, whose reputation had suffered greatly as a result of the 'conspiration of silence' during his lifetime, and following it. As René Martineau succinctly puts it, 'One will recognize in him [Bloy] an honest, affectionate, solitary man, of a ponderous mind and full of bravery, as neither the injustices nor the poverty that he faced had prevented him from achieving the most original, eloquent, and powerful work of our era... His complete works, while entering into literary history, will be Léon Bloyʼs best defense in the face of posterity.'
