Fortuné du Boisgobey
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

In 1878, Fortuné du Boisgobey continued Monsieur Lecoq’s fictitious life with an additional novel in two books: Le Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq and Le Nabob de Bahour: Sequel à la Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq. Some of du Boisgobey’s novels seem a diluted and pale imitation of Paul Féval’s work. He did not begin his writing career until, over forty, he returned from Africa, where he had served as paymaster to the French forces. Before returning to France, around 1863, he traveled for several years in Africa, the Orient, Germany, Austria, Greece, and Palestine. During the next thirty years he was a prolific writer, producing more than sixty, some sources say a hundred, volumes. He is often said to have used Fortuné du Boisgobey as a pseudonym, which is not true, an error that circulated almost immediately after his death and continues today on the Internet. A close friend and colleague, the American cultural attaché to France after the American War of Secession, General John Meredith Read, tried to dispel this rumor immediately after du Boisgobey’s death, writing:

It is a curious circumstance that one of the Journals in 1891, the day after the death of M. du Boisgobey, stated that his real name was Fortuné Castille, and that he was born at Granville, while another paper declared that he was the son of M. Abraham Dubois of Nantes. I was even told that he cut his father’s name in two, making it Du Bois, and added the last part, Gobey, which was his mother’s name, thus making it du Boisgobey. There is no truth in any of these assertions. M. du Boisgobey simply bore the name to which he was entitled, and which was one of prominence in the last century as well as in this.^[4]

The same information is given in du Boisgobey’s obituary in The New York Times on February 28, 1891, although the writer was certainly neither a friend nor an admirer of his work. The writer lists forty-seven novels and du Boisgobey’s second book of travels, after stating:

Fortunately, readers in France, Great Britain, and the United States did not share this opinion. Du Boisgobey’s works appeared, translated into English, in American bookstores shortly after they appeared in France. The New Princeton Review, describing “those eager to look into his peep show,” wrote:

Give him a murder, a mutilated body, a fast young man with a good heart, a selection from the demi-monde, an ingénue, a duel, a diving bell, and a game of baccarat — with these and a villain (who generally cheats at cards), M. Fortune du Boisgobey and his public are content — It is not very high art — far from that —but you go on reading because things really do occur in the tale, because you are curious, and because your curiosity makes you forget your work, forget your sorrow, forget ‘problems.’ metaphysical, social, financial, or religious.^[6]