author
Ferdinand Fabre
1827–1898
Drawn from the mountain villages of southern France, these novels bring peasants and priests to life with unusual warmth and realism. A onetime seminarian who became a respected man of letters, he wrote with deep feeling about the Cévennes and the Hérault countryside.
2 Audiobooks
Barnabé
by Ferdinand Fabre
Apotti Tigrane
by Ferdinand Fabre
About the author
Born in Bédarieux on June 9, 1827, Ferdinand Fabre grew up in the upper Orb valley in Hérault, a landscape that would shape much of his fiction. As a young man he studied in religious seminaries at Saint-Pons-de-Thomières and Montpellier, but he eventually left the path to the priesthood and turned to literature instead.
Fabre became known as a French novelist whose books often focus on rural life and the clergy of his native region. That background gave his work a distinctive point of view: he wrote about village society, belief, ambition, and daily struggle with a closeness that came from firsthand knowledge rather than distance.
Later in life, he was appointed curator of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris in 1883. He died in Paris on February 11, 1898, leaving behind a body of work remembered for its vivid sense of place and its sympathetic portrait of southern French life.