Petrus Borel
Pétrus Borel was a French poet and writer of the Romantic movement and a translator.
Born Joseph-Pierre Borel dHauterive at Lyon, the 12 of 14 children of an ironmonger, including his brother André Borel d'Hauterive. He studied architecture in Paris but abandoned it for literature. Nicknamed le Lycanthrope ("wolfman"), and the center of the circle of Bohemians in Paris, he was noted for extravagant and eccentric writing, foreshadowing Surrealism. He was not commercially successful though, and eventually was found a minor civil service post by his friends, including Theophile Gautier.
He died at Mostaganem in Algeria.
He was the subject of a biography by Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel: The Lycanthrope (1954).
Pétrus Borel dit « le lycanthrope » est un poète, traducteur et écrivain français, frère d'André Borel d'Hauterive.
Il est le douzième des quatorze enfants d'André Borel, quincaillier, et de Magdeleine Victoire Garnaud. He started to study architecture, but abandoned these studies to concentrate on literature.
Il est le centre du Petit-Cénacle (cercle des bohémiens à Paris) et il est connu pour son écriture extravagante et excentrique.
Il n'a pas beaucoup de succès et finalement il accepte un poste dans le service publique en Algérie, où il meure en 1859.
Il a fait l'objet d'une biographie d'Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel : The Lycanthrope (1954).
“You'll always be a pretty unhappy man if you are always going to insist on digging and getting beneath things, instead of viewing just the surface. Excavations of thought and reason are always deadly, and always followed by a landslide. We can't both live and think too much; we must renounce either one or the other. How could one support existence if, like you, he were always reflecting on things? For, only a little thought is needed to urge us on to death. Look at a star in the sky and ask what it is: then our misery, our low estate, our limited and thin intelligence, appear in all their splendor. In disgust, we pity ourselves; weak and ashamed of ourselves, who were once stupidly arrogant, we call for the relief of oblivion, even more incomprehensible . We must fix things so that they glance off us, like so many strikes off armor. Accept everything cheerfully. Laugh at it all.”
“It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.”
“Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!”
“In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.”
“To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.”
“I do not believe that one can become rich without being a shark; a sensitive man will never amass wealth.”