Charles Monselet

Charles Monselet (30 April 1825, Nantes - 19 May 1888, Paris) was a French journalist, novelist, poet and playwright, nicknamed "the king of the gastronomes" by his contemporaries. He specialised in comedic and romantic novels and his total output was around 40 volumes.

Charles Monselet
Portrait by Gaston Vuillier.

Self-portrait
in La Plume en 1891.

Charles Monselet
as a gastronome, after André Gill.

Autograph
in the poem Amelia.

Born at No. 16 rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in Nantes, a plaque bears witness to this on the facade, he lived in this city for the first nine years of his life, before his parents moved to Bordeaux. After growing up in Bordeaux, he returned to his hometown in 1852, before his literary career took place in Paris1.

The death of his friend Baron Brisse, during a dinner, earned him this joke - probably apocryphal: "Let's go to the table all the same!" He never liked overcooked fricots2. "

Literary snapshots, playful short stories, romance novels and detective stories, her bibliography includes around forty volumes full of color, gaiety and naturalness, in which women often play a central role, notably in La Franc-Maçonnerie des femmes (1856). A thick detective story set against a backdrop of sentimental intrigue. In the Paris of 1843, the young and ambitious Philippe Beyle falls in love with the beautiful singer Marianna, conquers her heart and then, having satisfied his vanity, abandons her. Humiliated, the singer uses her power within a female Freemasonry, a kind of parallel police headed by and for women, to launch the all-powerful secret society in the footsteps of her lover in order to satisfy his revenge.

His poem Les Petites Blanchisseuses enjoyed great notoriety in the 19th century. It is very often mentioned by Parisian journalists in their articles about laundresses at the time of their feast: Mi-Carême. Of this libertine poem, they only quote the first quatrain3, very correct, which does not suggest the rest:

The little laundresses That we see, every Monday, To lazy practices Wear the laundry at noon,

He is one of the authors of the pastiche, Le Parnassiculet contemporain4, and was a friend of Jean-Gabriel Capot de Feuillide, to whom he devoted a favorable review in La Lorgnette littéraire. Dictionary of large and small authors of my time 5. A particularly striking minute portrait of Charles Baudelaire adorns, among others, this amusing gallery of portraits. Editor-in-chief and founder of Le Gourmet newspaper.

Eugène Chavette, wanting to prove that Monselet was not a gourmet, invited him one day in the company of Aurélien Scholl to the restaurant Brébant, and made him serve a meal where the dishes did not correspond to the printed menu: Les nests d 'swallows were in fact simple noodles with mashed flageolet beans, cod bream cooked on a comb, heather cock, a small turkey with absinthe, Château-Larose, Mâcon with a few drops of Grassot punch, etc. Monselet found the dishes and wines to be exquisite.

The same year, he commits the Forgotten and the Dédaignés, picturesque rehabilitation of little-known authors of the eighteenth century, and, by comparison, points to the eclecticism of the stylistic schools of the middle of the Second Empire.

He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (66th division).