Edouard Pailleron

Born in Paris on December 17, 1834, Édouard Pailleron became a successful playwright and poet whose work found a wide audience in French theater. He built his reputation on elegant comedies of manners, writing with a light touch about vanity, family life, and the habits of polite society.

His most famous play, Le Monde où l’on s’ennuie (1881), was especially celebrated and helped secure his lasting place in French literary history. Pailleron was elected to the Académie française in 1882, a sign of the esteem he had earned in the literary world.

He died on April 19, 1899. Today he is remembered chiefly for the grace and irony of his stage writing, and for the way his plays capture the social world of late 19th-century France.