1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bazin, René

BAZIN, RENÉ (1853–), French novelist and man of letters, was born at Angers on the 26th of December 1853. He studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became professor of law in the Catholic university there. He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, but he made his reputation by Une Tache d’encre (1888), which received a prize from the Academy. Other novels of great charm and delicacy followed: La Sarcelle bleue (1892); Madame Corentine (1893); Humble Amour (1894); De toute son âme (1897); La Terre qui meurt (1899); Les Oberlé (1901), an Alsatian story which was dramatized and acted in the following year; L’Âme alsacienne (1903); Donatienne (1903); L’Isolée (1905); Le Blé qui lève (1907); Mémoires d’une vieille fille (1908). La Terre qui meurt, a picture of the decay of peasant farming and a story of La Vendée, is an indirect plea for the development of provincial France. A volume of Questions littéraires et sociales appeared in 1906. René Bazin was admitted to the Academy on the 28th of April 1904.