BAZIN  , REN$ (1853– ),

French novelist and man of letters, was born at Angers on the 26th of December 1853 . He studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became professor of law in the Catholic university there . He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, but he made his reputation by Une Tache d'encre (1888), which received a prize from the Academy . Other novels of great charm and delicacy followed: La Sarcelle bleue (1892); Madame Corentine (1893); Humble Amour (1894); De toute son time (1897); La Terre qui meurt (1899); Les Oberle (1901), an Alsatian story which was dramatized and acted in the following year; L'Ame alsacienne (1903); Donatienne (1903); L'Isolee (1905); Le Ble qui leve (1907) Memoires d'une vieille fille (1908) . La Terre qui meurt, a picture of the decay of peasant farming and a story of La Vendee, is an indirect plea for the development of provincial France . A volume of Questions litteraires et sociales appeared in 1906 . Rene Bazin was admitted to the Academy on the 28th of April 1904 .