Xavier Forneret

Xavier Forneret (16 September 1809 in Beaune, Côte-d'Or – 7 July 1884) was a French writer, poet, playwright and journalist.

Life Born in 1809 bourgeois family by the name Antoine Charles Ferdinand, he was one of the few members of the Romantic movement who never experienced poverty and could afford to publish his books himself. In his hometown, he became an advocate of the new art. Between 1837 and 1840 he lived in Paris. Spiritually, he was a member of the Bouzingo, a group of poets which advocated a radical bohemian romanticism in life and art; contemporaries and kindred spirits included Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier, yet the Cénacle in the Rue du Doyenné never accepted him as a member, since the radical romantics saw him as an eccentric bourgeois with little talent. He returned to Beaune after three years, living his life of a rich eccentric man (he lived in an old gothic tower which had all walls painted black and silver, played the violin by an open window all night, and slept in a coffin).

Selected bibliography Contes et récits Deux destinées, 1834 L'homme noir (The Black Man), 1835, a play Vingt-trois. Trente-cinq (Twenty three. Thirty five), 1835, a play Rien... quelque chose, 1836 Sans titre (Untitled), 1838 Vapeurs, ni vers ni prose et sans titre, par un homme noir, blanc de visage (Vapours, neither poetry nor prose, written by a black man with a white face), 1838 Encore un an de "sans titre", 1840 Pièce de pièces, temps perdu, 1840 Voyage d'agrément de Beaune à Autun, 1850 Lettre à Victor Hugo, 1851 Lignes rimées, 1853 Mère et fille, 1854 L'infanticide, 1856 Ombre de poésie, 1860 Quelques mots sur la peine de mort, 1861 Broussailles de pensées, 1870

In popular culture In the 1992 British horror-romance film, Tale of a Vampire, a centuries-old vampire and scholar (Julian Sands) approaches an occult-specialist librarian (Suzanna Hamilton) whom he sees reading an antique volume of Forneret's works. He tells her that his favourite poem by Forneret is "Le pauvre honteux" ("A Shameful Pauper")—"about a starving man who eats his own hand".

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