Octave Feuillet

Octave Feuillet was the favourite novelist of the Second Empire — Empress Eugénie kept him at Fontainebleau as her librarian, and critics called him the family Musset for writing passion that stayed decorous. Monsieur de Camors, his study of a man who makes ambition a religion, is the exception: cold, exact and unforgiving. He was elected to the Académie française at forty-one.