Paul Léautaud

Paul Léautaud (18 January 1872 – 22 February 1956) was a French writer and theater critic for Mercure de France, signing his often caustic reviews with the pseudonym Maurice Boissard.

He was born in Paris, and abandoned by his mother soon after birth. His father, Firmin Léautaud, who begrudgingly brought him up, was a prompter at the Comédie-Française, and because of him Paul first became familiar with the world of the theater.

According to Nancy Mitford in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (p. 251), Leautaud was an eccentric literary critic and diarist who said he loved cats and dogs more than people, lived on nothing but potatoes and cheese for eight years, and never travelled further than Calais.

Mavis Gallant described him in her Paris Notebooks (Toronto: Stoddart, 1988):

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