Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail

Pierre Alexis, Viscount of Ponson du Terrail, was a French novelist born in 1829 and dead in 1871. Writing in French during the Second Empire for the popular press of Paris, he is remembered today above all for creating Rocambole, whose adventures gave the French language the word rocambolesque, used for any far-fetched chain of events.

He was born in Montmaur, in the French Alps. His early books belong to the Gothic novel tradition, with tales of revenge set in macabre surroundings, such as La Baronne Trépassée (1852). Fame came with the Rocambole series, which began in 1857 in the daily La Patrie. He reportedly meant only to echo the success of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris, but he developed a formula of his own: a hero who passes through a chain of incidents, some risky and some implausible, in pursuit of his goals. The series ran to nine novels and provided a steady income that let him keep writing for years.

He wrote in a hurry and seldom reread his pages, pressed by publication deadlines. His prose therefore keeps some eccentric lines, such as hands described as cold as those of a snake.

In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, he lived through an episode that could have come from his own fiction. After Napoleon III was defeated, he left Paris for his estate near Orléans, where he tried to organise resistance to the German occupation. The Germans burned his castle, and he had to flee to Bordeaux, where he died in 1871, leaving the saga unfinished. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

His legacy lies mainly in literature and language. Rocambole bridged the old Gothic novel and modern heroic adventure, and his name still lives on in French.