Life and Work
His father was a carpenter who moved to Bernay in 1844 on being made a gendarme. After an uncertain period on leaving school, the teenager took apprenticeship under a printer at Pont Audemer and there wrote a three-act verse drama for the local theatre about the townsfolk in the 17th century. He then joined a travelling company of actors as prompter.
In the course of a wandering existence about the north of France, he fell in with the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who introduced him to the Odes funambulesques (Fantastic Odes) of Théodore de Banville. Inspired by these, he published at eighteen his Vignes folles (Mad Vines, 1857), which he dedicated to his 'beloved master'. During a subsequent stay in Paris he had an act in the cafes and bars in which he improvised poems on rhymes suggested by his audience, putting to use the slight stir that this high-spirited first volume had caused. Once more on the road, still turning out plays and occasionally acting, he left a scattering of such improvisations and occasional verses in the little provincial newspapers.
His inseparable companion and trademark at this time was a French terrier named Toupinel. Its successor was the mongrel Cosette, the subject of one of Glatigny's sonnets and also included in the caricature of him by André Gill. This illustrated the bizarre episode in Corsica early in 1869 when he was arrested and put in irons for a week through being mistaken by the authorities for a notorious criminal. Typically, he immediately published an account of the incident in Le jour de l'an d'un vagabond (A day in a tramp's year). In 1871, weakened by the hardships of his life and in poor health, he married Emma Dennie, who was American-born but brought up in France. She nursed him though his final illness two years later but survived him barely a month.
Glatigny's best collection of lyrics, Les Flèches d'or (Arrows of gold), had appeared in 1864, dedicated to the Parnassian poet Leconte de Lisle, with an opening poem addressed to Théophile Gautier. It was followed by other occasional verse, including Le Fer Rouge (Red light, 1870) and a third collection of poems, Gilles et pasquins (Tom-fooleries, 1872), dedicated to the left-wing politician Camille Pelletan. In 1917 his collected works were awarded the prix de littérature by the Académie française.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Albert Alexandre Glatigny
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