[Jean François Victor]. French poet and dramatist, born at Toulon on the 4th of February 1848. His father, Jean Aicard, was a journalist of some distinction, and the son early began his career in 1867 with Les Jeunes Croyances, followed in 1870 by a one-act play produced at the Marseilles theatre. His poems include the following: Les Rébellions et les apaisements (1871); Poémes de Provence (1874), and La Chanson de l’enfant (1876), both of which were crowned by the Academy; Miette et Noré (1880), a Provençal idyll; Le Livre d’heures de l’amour (1887); Jésus (1896), &c. Of his plays the most successful was Le Père Lebonnard (1890), which was originally produced at the Théâtre Libre. Among his other works are the novels, Le Roi de Camargue (1890), L’Âme d’un enfant (1898) and Tatas (1901), Benjamine (1906) and La Vénus de Milo (1874), an account of the discovery of the statue from unpublished documents. He published after 1910 a collection of poems for children (1912) and Hollande, Algérie (1913), as well as various volumes of war poetry, a novel Arlette des Mayons (1917), and two volumes of adventure stories, Un Bandit à la Française and its sequel Le fameux chevalier Gaspard de Besse, both in 1919. He died in Paris on the 13th of May 1921.
