Life
His father was general and marquis Joseph-Barthélemy de Ricard (who successively served Napoléon I, then the Bourbons and finally was premier aide-de-camp of Jérôme Bonaparte in 1852).
Ricard's first collection of poetry, Les chants de l'aube (Songs of Dawn) was published in 1862 by Poulet-Malassis. In March 1863, after receiving an inheritance from an aunt, he founded La Revue du progrès. Among the contributors to the Revue were Charles Longuet and a young Paul Verlaine (his first published poem). The Revue lasted one year; the atheist sentiments of the Revue lead to a Monseigneur Dupanloup taking legal action against the Revue on the grounds that it was an outrage to public morals and good mores. Ricard was defended by a talented young attorney, Léon Gambetta, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, reduced to three, at Sainte Pélagie, and had to pay a fine of 1,200 francs. After serving his sentence, his friends manifested an active support, and this small group of supporters was the origin of the politico-literary salon that met every Friday at the home of Ricard's mother, 10 Boulevard des Batignolles. Ricard was happy to entertain these boisterous republican and anti-clerical youths. Many great French poets and writers of the future attended: Anatole France, Sully Prudhomme, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée; and Raoul Rigault, the future attorney of the Commune de Paris (1871).
In March 1866, Ricard and Catulle Mendès were appointed by editor Alphonse Lemerre to be directors of a now famous and pivotal collection of poetry called Le Parnasse contemporain, a collection that gave the name Parnassian to a group of poets that came to be known as Parnassians. Ricard also contributed 8 poems to that first collection. In 1867 Verlaine, a friend of Ricard (whom he called "an excellent Langue d'Ocian poet"), dedicated his Les Vaincus to Ricard, a poem on the vanquished of 1848.
Read more about this topic: Louis-Xavier De Ricard
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.”
—Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897)
“There is a right according to which we may deprive a human being of his life but none according to which we may deprive him of his death: to do so is mere cruelty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of “public relations.” Without it, America would be grim indeed.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)