Saint-Pol-Roux
| Paul-Pierre Roux | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 15 January 1861 Marseille |
| Died | 18 October 1940 Brest |
| Pen name | Saint-Pol-Roux |
| Occupation | Poet and writer |
| Nationality | French |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genre | Poetry, opera, drama |
| Literary movement | Symbolism |
| Children | One daughter, Divine |
Paul-Pierre Roux, called Saint-Pol-Roux (15 January 1861, quartier de Saint-Henry, Marseille - 18 October 1940, Brest) was a French Symbolist poet.
Saint-Pol-Roux was born to a middle-class family in Marseille, where his father was an industrialist. He studied in a lycée in Lyon, and left it as Bachelor of Arts in 1880. He then wrote some plays under his own name.
He left the south of France to install himself in Paris. He particularly frequented the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom Saint-Pol-Roux had the greatest admiration. He won a certain notoriety, trying out several pseudonyms before finally becoming "Saint-Pol-Roux le magnifique". He even got one of his plays, La Dame à la faux, put on by Sarah Bernhardt, and was interviewed by Jules Huret as a member of the Symbolist movement. He perhaps participated in the Rosicrucian aesthetic of Péladan. Nevertheless, he wrote nothing on the movement or on its founder although Saint-Pol-Roux seems to have been interested in this audacious literary attempt.
Saint-Pol-Roux leaves Paris in 1898, having come to hate it for his being ostracized, and for the mediocrity of the literary criticism circles, ignoring it with as much pride as he himself had been ignored. On a clairvoyant's advice, and also to escape his creditors, he left, firstly for the Ardennes. There he settled with his wife in Roscanvel, in Finistère, where their daughter Divine was born. After his father's death, he moved to Camaret and made Britanny the center for his work.
Living off the revenue he earned from his libretto for the opera Louise, he bought a house overlooking the ocean, above the Pen Had beach, on the road to pointe de Pen Hir, and transformed it into a manor in the Baroque style. He named it the 'Manoir de Coecilian', after his son's name, or sometimes 'Manoir des Boultous'. He wrote "Facing the sea, man is closer to God" ("Face à la mer, l'homme est plus près de Dieu"). He welcomed several artists and writers, notably Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who looked up to him as an ancestor, and even Jean Moulin, then 'sous-préfet de Châteaulin', who visited in 1930.
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