author
1809–1877
A 19th-century French poet remembered as a deeply local voice, he wrote with strong feeling for the landscapes and legends of Périgord. His best-known work, La femme du diable, blends regional folklore with a dark, dramatic imagination.
Born in 1809 and dying in 1877, Joseph Lafon-Labatut was a French poet associated closely with the Périgord region. A posthumous 1878 edition of La femme du diable presents him as a writer whose reputation rested on being fiercely loyal both to France and to his native province, and Jules Claretie praised him as a true provincial poet in the best sense of the term.
Project Gutenberg's record for La femme du diable identifies the book as one of his posthumous works and notes that it was issued with a biographical notice by Gabriel Lafon. The work itself is a narrative poem rooted in local legend, which helps explain why Lafon-Labatut is remembered less as a Paris literary figure than as a poet of place, atmosphere, and regional memory.
Some brief modern descriptions also say that after publishing Insomnies et Regrets in 1846, he received a prize from the Académie française and later support from the state, but the details available here are too thin to state more firmly. What can be said with confidence is that his surviving reputation rests on a small but vivid body of poetry, especially writing tied to Périgord's folklore and identity.