Charles Monselet (30 April 1825, Nantes – 19 May 1888, Paris) was a French writer and gourmand.
Biography
Monselet was born at No. 16 rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in Nantes, on the facade of which building a plaque now memorializes him. As the son of a bookseller, Monselet handled books before writing them, and in his childhood developed a taste for books and a love of letters. He passed the first nine years of his life in his city of birth, before his parents moved to Bordeaux. After growing up in Bordeaux, he returned to his hometown in 1852, and, like his father, made his first forays into the literary profession, after an apprenticeship, first as a typesetter, then as a proofreader, at the Courrier de la Gironde. He rose from faits divers to the entrefilet, then to full articles in the smaller journals, upon which Félix Solar summoned him to Paris where he had founded L'Époque (1865), and where he lived in close contact with the bohemian writers Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Albert Glatigny, Alfred Delvau, Charles Bataille, Amédée Rolland, and others. In Paris, Monselet was also one of the most frequent guests at the home of Victor Hugo, who often would say to him: "When I write to you, as M. Monselet, quai Voltaire, I'm always tempted to put on the envelope: to M. de Voltaire, quai Monselet."
L'Époque having failed, he went on to work at la Presse, where he made successful entry into all genres: literary history, bibliography, theater, poetry, novels, short stories, theater feuilletons, articles of criticism. He refused no work. He provided series of chronicles and feuilletons to Le Pays, l'Assemblée nationale, l’Athenœum and la Presse, very careful studies inserted in the Revue de Paris, the Bibliothèque galante du XVIIIe siècle, articles in Le Constitutionnel, Le Monde Illustré, then at Le Figaro.
