Paul Foucher

Paul-Henri Foucher (21 April 1810 – 24 January 1875) was a French playwright, theatre and music critic, political journalist, and novelist. Biography Early career Foucher was born in Paris and began his career as an employee in the offices of the War Department. One day he visited the poet Alexandre Soumet, who asked Foucher whether he had read his brother-in-law's play Amy Robsart. (Foucher's older sister Adèle had married Victor Hugo in 1822.) "If you have not read it, there are some fine scenes in it." Later Foucher asked Hugo if he could look at the play, and Hugo, who had been planning to burn it, instead gave it to Foucher and consented to let him revise it. Hugo had written the first three acts himself at the age of nineteen. He had then shown it to Soumet, who had disliked it, so Hugo had given his approval for Soumet to alter and finish it. The play combined comedy and tragedy, and Foucher, under the influence of the enormous success of Shakespeare as recently performed in Paris, revised it further and produced it under his own name in 1829, but it was such a complete failure, that Hugo "came forward and avowed his own share in the production, taking responsibility of the non-success." Nevertheless, the whole affair did gain the young Foucher some notability. The play was never published, although Hugo gave the manuscript to Alexandre Dumas, père, "who had it for a long time in his possession." Career as a dramatist Foucher soon obtained employment as a journalist and proceeded to write a new play, Yseul Raimbaud, which was first presented at the Théâtre de l'Odéon on 17 November 1830. It was attacked by the classiques (as the opponents of romanticism were then called), "but all agreed that there was talent and vigor in it. From that time the author's success was assured."