Charles Nodier (1780–1844) holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French Romantic you have never heard of. A child prodigy, Nodier was reading Montaigne and Plutarch, and writing fluently in French and Latin, by the age of ten. By twenty-five he had vandalized a guillotine, founded the ironically Freemasonesque antiJacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the irst French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem “La Napoléone.” It was only then that he got serious, and in 1806 Les tristes was published, a collection of short stories, poems, dialogues, and essays that marked him as a disciple of the Romanticism of Goethe and Schiller and hinted at his future affinity for the visionary, fantastic mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann.