Félix Pyat, The People's Playwright

Scholars familiar with the lesser lights of the 1830s and forties will recall the name of Felix Pyat. A lithograph executed in the 1850s by the designer Nadar (Félix Tournachon) and depicting the best-known Romantics, shows Pyat shoulder to shoulder with the greats, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Dumas, Vigny, Lamartine, Béranger, Heine, and others, as their youthful associate. Today he evokes incidental remembrance as the Berrichon companion of George Sand and Jules Sandeau and, according to his own reminiscences, the person who converted Eugène Suë into a socialist writer. In his day Pyat enjoyed prominence as a journalist and especially as a writer of melodrama, or, as he called it, ‘people's theater’.