Jean Lorrain

Born Paul Alexandre Martin Duval in Fécamp on August 9, 1855, he wrote under the name Jean Lorrain and became a French poet and novelist associated with Symbolism. He was known for his cultivated dandy image and for moving through the fashionable artistic circles of Paris during the Belle Époque.

His writing often explored decadence, desire, spectacle, and the theatrical side of modern city life. Alongside poetry and fiction, he also worked as a journalist, and his public persona helped make him one of the more talked-about literary figures of his time.

Jean Lorrain died in Paris on June 30, 1906. More than a century later, he is still remembered for the intensity of his style and for capturing the nervous beauty and excess of late nineteenth-century French culture.