Louis Hyacinthe Bouilhet Biography | Poet

BOUILHET, LOUIS HYACINTHE (1822-1869), French poet and dramatist, was born at Cany, Seine Inférieure, on the 27th of May 1822. He was a schoolfellow of Gustave Flaubert, to whom he dedicated his first work, Méloenis (1851), a narrative poem in five cantos, dealing with Roman manners under the emperor Commodus. His volume of poems entitled Fossiles attracted considerable attention, on account of the attempt therein to use science as a subject for poetry. These poems were included also in Festons et astragales (1859). As a dramatist he secured a success with his first play, Madame de Montarcy (1856), which ran for seventy-eight nights at the Odéon; and Hélène Peyron (1858) and L’Oncle Million (1860) were also favourably received. But of his other plays, some of them of real merit, only the Conjuration d’Amboise (1866) met with any great success. Bouilhet died on the 18th of July 1869, at Rouen. Flaubert published his posthumous poems with a notice of the author, in 1872.