The Song of the Skylark

<p>The Song of the Skylark (1880) is quite uncategorizable defying classification as a novel yet its complexity stretching the notion of a book-length “poem in prose”. It is unique in the annals of French literature although it has certain affinities with Edgar Quinet’s Merlin the Enchanter (1860) which similarly attempts to fuse a transfiguration of the author’s own life-story with a fakeloristic pseudohistory of France. centered on the historical fantasy Vercingétorix in which the author attempts to reconfigure episodes reported in Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bellio Gallico into a pseudohistory and imaginary prehistory of Gaul one that inxcludes an idiosyncratic theory of serial reincarnation.</p><p> </p><p>However puzzling L’Estoille’s work might be in its strangeness and unorthodoxy however it is certainly not lacking in sanity and its pathos is highly effective. It is a pity that it was so neglected at its time of publication and it is fully deserving of the modern reappraisal that its reappearance in the twenty-first century permits.</p>