In spite of the fashionable popularity achieved by Octave Feuillet as early as the year 1855, a popularity which never waned to his last hour, it seems that his life, which we should have pictured excessively brilliant and public, was in reality quiet and retired. The author of "M. de Camors" and of the "Roman d'un Jeune Homme pauvre" was, as his portraits attest, melancholy of temperament and contemplative of mind, a man who was happiest in his own study, who preferred the distant echoes of his literary triumphs in his home, to noisy manifestations thereof in the world of social pleasure.
OCTAVE FEUILLET (In 1850) After a drawing by the engraver Monciau
Feuillet was the official novelist of the Second Empire, the pet writer of the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was received at Court among the distinguished guests who had the entrée at Compiègne and Fontainebleau. His plays and proverbes were acted in the Imperial theatres, at fashionable watering-places, and on the miniature stages of marionettes. The Empress treated him with marked distinction. It is difficult to understand why an author so honoured and so much sought after should have left so few portraits—canvases, medallions, water-colours or engravings. Feuillet evidently was not lavish of his time in his sittings to artists, for neither Dubufe, nor Carolus-Duran, nor Winterhalter reproduced his features—a fact we find it almost hard to believe of a man who enjoyed the popularity of Feuillet. But we must accept the fact.
OCTAVE FEUILLET (In 1879) After a sketch made in Geneva
Madame Octave Feuillet, to whom I went for final confirmation of this supposed dearth of artistic documents relating to her deceased husband, showed me everything she had as mementoes of the delicate psychologist to whose success she so largely contributed by her feminine diplomacy, her social observations, and her subtle and very cultivated mind.
"Alas!" she said, "I do not know why I am not richer in pictures of my dear lost one, for he had endless opportunities of being painted, but he was always too nervous and too busy to undertake the sittings proposed by various artists. This is why I can only show you a little portrait painted by Bonvin just before 1850, which represents him with a Musset-like face, and agrees pretty closely with a drawing of the same period by the engraver Monciau, which could easily be reproduced."
OCTAVE FEUILLET After a photograph taken in 1880