Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob (Chaville, 1867 – Paris, 1905) was a French writer, critic and translator associated with symbolism. He is remembered mainly for the short prose pieces he wrote between 1891 and 1897, texts that sit somewhere between the story and the prose poem, and for the influence they had on later writers, among them Borges, who took Imaginary Lives as a model for his Universal History of Infamy.

Born into a cultivated Jewish family, he grew up in Nantes, where his father ran a newspaper, before moving to Paris to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. There he showed a striking talent for languages. In 1884 he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who became both a role model and an author he translated. He was also fascinated by slang, especially the argot of the medieval coquillards that appears in Villon's ballads, and he studied it with unusual seriousness for his time. After failing the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure, he took his degree in letters in 1888 and earned his living as a journalist.

His fiction came out in collections such as Cœur double, The King in the Golden Mask, Mimes, The Book of Monelle and The Children's Crusade. He worked in brief forms, shifted voices often and wrote in a restrained tone, looking for new techniques rather than conventional plots. The Book of Monelle, dedicated to Louise, a young woman with whom he kept a discreet relationship until she died of tuberculosis, is perhaps his most personal book and the one that brought him the most recognition in his lifetime.

His health was fragile from 1896, when he developed a chronic intestinal illness. In 1900 he married the actress Marguerite Moreno, and in 1901 he travelled to Jersey and to Samoa, following the path of Stevenson, who had died there shortly before. He did not reach the writer's tomb, because he had to return to France in a hurry. He died of influenza in Paris in 1905, aged 37.

His legacy lies largely in the debt other writers owed him. Gide, Faulkner, Andrzejewski, Borges and Arreola all recognised in his short pieces a model for exploring what a story could be, and his name remains attached to the history of the short narrative in French.