Edmond About
1828–1885
Biography
Edmond About, whose full name was Edmond François Valentin About, lived from 1828 to 1885. He was born at Dieuze in the Lorraine region of France. He went on to the École Normale, where he was lively and independent, and a story told of his schooldays says that a master warned he would never be more than a little Voltaire. After a period at the French school in Athens he returned to France in 1853 and devoted himself to literature and journalism.
About became known as a witty, anti-clerical satirist, and his best-known novel is Le Roi des montagnes (1856). Its brigand chief turns his band into a registered joint-stock company, a joke that grew out of About's observation in Greece, where bandits and the police seemed to have reached an understanding. His other work ranges widely: a study of modern Greece, novels such as Madelon, the working-man novel Le roman d'un brave homme, written as a rebuttal of Zola's view of the French workman in L'Assommoir, and many pamphlets and newspaper articles.
The novel has appeared in English under different titles, among them The King of the Mountains. The book on this site is the Esperanto edition, La Reĝo de la Montoj, credited in the catalogue to Gaston Moch as translator. Its satire of bandits, officials and respectable business is the quality that made About's name in the nineteenth century, and it remains the easiest way into his comic, anti-clerical style.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
La Reĝo de la Montoj
by Edmond About (translated by Gaston Moch)
Edmond About's comic adventure in Gaston Moch's 1909 Esperanto translation. In 1856 a young German botanist collecting plants in the hills outside Athens is captured, along with two English ladies, by Hadgi-Stavros, the polished and businesslike king of the mountain brigands.…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.