Exploring French Literature Quiz

Question: Whose play The Bald Soprano helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd?

Answer: Eugène Ionesco’s one-act “antiplay” La Cantatrice chauve (1949; The Bald Soprano) inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd.

Question: Which French poet saw a remarkable similarity between his own temperament and that of Edgar Allan Poe and translated a number of Poe’s stories into French?

Answer: Charles Baudelaire discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe in 1847. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the almost preternatural similarities between the American writer's thought and temperament and his own, he embarked upon the task of translating Poe, which was to provide him with his most regular occupation and income for the rest of his life.

Question: Where was the writer Albert Camus born?

Answer: Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria. He and his elder brother Lucien later moved with their mother to a working-class district of Algiers. Camus’s first published collection of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit (1937; “The Wrong Side and the Right Side”), describes the physical setting of these early years.

Question: Of whom did Gustave Flaubert say, “He’s my disciple and I love him like a son”?

Answer: Guy de Maupassant’s mother, Laure, was the sister of Alfred Le Poittevin, who had been a close friend of Gustave Flaubert. Laure sent her son to make Flaubert’s acquaintance at Croisset in 1867, and, when Maupassant went to Paris after the Franco-German War, she asked Flaubert to keep an eye on him. This was the beginning of the apprenticeship that was the making of Maupassant the writer. Whenever Flaubert was staying in Paris, he used to invite Maupassant to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his youthful literary exercises. He also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time, such as Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond Goncourt, and Henry James. “He’s my disciple and I love him like a son,” Flaubert said of Maupassant.

Question: What French author was tried for the alleged immorality of his novel Madame Bovary?

Answer: The French government brought Gustave Flaubert to trial (January–February 1857) on the grounds of the alleged immorality of his novel Madame Bovary, and he narrowly escaped conviction.

Question: Which novel by Émile Zola focuses on the hardships of coal miners?

Answer: Émile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), which is generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece, depicts life in a mining community; it focuses on the hardships of the miners.

Question: Which French dramatist and historiographer is renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy?

Answer: Jean Racine is the French dramatist and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy.

Question: Which French writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 but declined to accept it?

Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it, claiming that a writer must “refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution.”