The Biography of Lon Bloy

The Biography of Lon Bloy: Memories of a Friend, published in 1921, is the official biography of Lon Bloy (1846-1917) by his friend, Ren Martineau. Ren Martineau and Lon Bloy were good friends for the last eighteen years of the latter writers life.

"The first time I met Lon Bloy was at the train station in Lagny, in 1901." Lagny or Lagny-sur-Marne or, as Lon Bloy later put it, "Cochons-sur-Marne" ("cochons" meaning "pigs" in French). Bloy goes into day-after-day detail about the struggles he lived through there, in his published journal Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne (Quatre ans de Captivit Cochons-sur-Marne)... four grievous years in the artists already grievous life. They were, in Ren Martineaus words, four years of "... unexpected contact of the most vulgar provincial villagers with the least common of French writers."

The biography continues to follow Bloy, after Lagny, in Montmartre and then Bourg-la-Reine, (outside of Paris), until his passing. It also covers Bloys early years, based on information obtained from the writer himself, and his wife, Mme. Bloy, as well as from letters, and friends.

It is as much a biography as a defense, or apologia, of the great writer, whose reputation had suffered greatly as a result of the "conspiration of silence" during his lifetime, and following it. As Ren Martineau succinctly puts it, "One will recognize in him [Bloy] an honest, affectionate, solitary man, of a ponderous mind and full of bravery, as neither the injustices nor the poverty that he faced had prevented him from achieving the most original, eloquent, and powerful work of our era... His complete works, while entering into literary history, will be Lon Bloys best defense in the face of posterity."