Jean Lombard

Who was Jean Lombard?

Jean Lombard was a French novelist of the late nineteenth century.

Lombard was born in Toulon, Var. His work, with its themes of orientalism, androgyny and paganism, had deep affiliations with the Decadent movement in literature. Although almost completely forgotten today, he influenced contemporaries such as Rachilde and Jean Lorrain. His best-known work, based on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, is L'agonie, for which Octave Mirbeau wrote a preface. According to William Sharp, Lombard died in 1891 in poverty, bordering on starvation.