Charles Victor Cherbuliez was a Swiss- French author, playwright, literary and art critic and a member of the Académie Française. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, the son of M. Andre Cherbuliez, a professor of Latin and Greek studies at the University of Geneva. Cherbuliez was the descendant of French Huguenots who had generations earlier fled to Switzerland to escape persecution. Cherbuliez would later gain his French citizenship through a Napoleonic era law that revoked the Edict of Nantes and allowed descendants of Protestant families who had left France to claim French citizenship. Cherbuliez attended schools in Geneva, Paris, Bonn and Berlin before returning to Geneva to Teach. Inspired by the literary style of George Sand, his first book, "Un Cheval de Phidias", was published in Paris in 1860.

He was the author of two five-act plays "Samuel Brohl" and "L'aventure du Ladislaw Bolski", along with a number of other works of fiction and non-fiction. A list of his best known works probably would include "Le Comte Kostia" (1863), "Le Peince Vitale "(1864), "Jean Têterol's Idea"(1870) "Samuel Brohl et Cie" (1877), "Samuel Brohl" (1879), "Noirs et rouges" (1881), "La Vocation du Comte Ghislain" (1888) and "Jacquine Vanesse "(1898). Cherbuliez published a number of works under the pseudonym G. Valbert.

Cherbuliez received the Légion d'honneur in 1870 and was elected to the Académie Française in 1881.

A popular quote of his that appeared in a number of American newspapers a century or so ago was; "My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth or else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose a great many of them by the way".

Charles Victor Cherbuliez died on 2 July, 1899 at Combs-la-Ville, a suburbs of Paris.

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Victor Cherbuliez

Writer