French poet, born in St. Remy, Bouches-du-Rhône, on the 8th of August 1818; professor in a Tarascon school; finally settled in Avignon as a bookseller. While at Tarascon he wrote a poem in the Provençal language to please his mother, who could not understand his French verse. The title of the work was Jejè, and its literary style was the revival of a form of speech once common in France, but obsolete at this time except among certain country people. A coterie intent on a Provençal renaissance soon gathered about him, which took the name of the Félibres, and of it Frédéric Mistral became the chief ornament; Roumanille, at the time of his death, was its Capoulié. He wrote Oubrets en Vers, Lou Curat de Cucugna, and Lou Abal Tabuissoun. His writings are characterized by the blithe gayety and the monkish paganism of troubadour times—quaint, sincere and humorous in their childlike artlessness. He died in Avignon on the 24th of May 1891.
