Charles Du Bos

Charles Du Bos (known as Charlie to his friends) was a French essayist and critic . He was born 27 October 1882 in Paris and died 5 August 1939 at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, where he is buried.

Charles Du Bos was the first child of a family moving in the highest Parisian society. His father was the diplomat Auguste Du Bos, Knight of the Legion of Honour and a friend of the Prince of Wales. His mother, Mary Johnston, was English and brought up her son with a fluent command of her language. He was schooled at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and later spent a year at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1907 he married Juliette (Zézette) Siry, by whom he had one daughter, Primerose.

Having initially studied art history, he turned his interest to literature and was friendly with many of the leading writers of the time, not simply in France but abroad as well. In 1908 his translation of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth was published. Then at the outbreak of World War 1 he worked with her in founding the Foyer Franco Belge to help refugees from the occupied areas. It was during this time too that he worked with André Gide, with whom he began a close friendship until they eventually fell out after the publication of Du Bos’ Le dialogue avec André Gide (1929).

As a member of the circle about Maria van Rysselberghe (wife of the painter Théo van Rysselberghe), he had been among those who planned the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), for which he wrote frequently. Following years of agnosticism and then conversion to Catholicism in 1927, he became editor of Jacques Maritain’s review, Vigile (1930-33), to which NRF’s Catholic authors had defected. In this appeared his essays “The Spiritual in Literature” and “François Mauriac and the problem of the Catholic novelist”, which are indicative of his moral preoccupations. As an Anglophile, he also featured English Catholic poets in the review, including Coventry Patmore, Maurice Baring, G.K. Chesterton and Fredegond Shove.

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