GAUTIER, Théophile. - Poet and novelist, born in Tarbes on 30 Aug. 1811, died in Paris on 23 Oct. 1872. A pupil at the Parisian Collège Louis-le-Grand, he later attended the studio of the painter Rioult, though the vivid descriptive notation of that period remained the hallmark of his literary work.
Introduced to V. Hugo in 1830, he joined the Romantic movement and became one of the ardent supporters of *Hernani*. In July of the same year he published a small collection of poems, reissued in 1833 under the title *Albertus ou l'âme tel le péché, légende théologique*, whose Romanticism found expression in a verse already tending toward stylistic purity. With *Les Jeunes France, romans goguenards* (1833), he critiqued the excesses of V. Hugo’s Romantic principles, steering his art toward the comic and grotesque. The publication of the novel *Mademoiselle de Maupin* (1836) set out the exact terms of his spiritual biography, revealing his inability to make ethical judgments, his intellectually grounded anti-Christian stance, and his love for the impossible and for a beauty that, being mere form, lapses into banality. The novel also displays a lack of human sensitivity, stemming from excessive analysis and a deficiency of common sense. From that ecstatic aestheticism, which G. rejected in favor of a voluptuous paganism, there nonetheless arose in him the anguished questions about the meaning of life and death, to which the characters of *La comédie de la mort* (1838) are unable to respond.
From the material of his travels in Spain, Constantinople, Russia, and Italy came his liveliest pages, precisely because the description of the external world found in him a colorist for whom no storehouse of ideas was necessary. For the same reason, in *Le capitaine Fracasse* (1863) the finest pages are those of the etchings and sketches rather than the plot, which recounts the life of a wandering troupe of actors in the time of Louis XIII.
In 1832 there appeared the collection of poems entitled *Émaux et camées*, in which his mastery of verse reached perfection, and his art, becoming impersonal and detached from every interest save the formal, anticipated the Parnassian movement. Baudelaire considered G. his master and in the dedication of *Les fleurs du mal* called him “poète impeccable.”
Mari Luisa Rondini