Charles Paul de Cock was a French novelist and playwright. His father was a Dutch banker who was executed by guillotine in 1794 during the Reign of Terror in France. In 1820, Charles Paul de Kock started working on an extensive and successful series of novels about Parisian life called “Georgette, or the Notary’s Niece”. De Kock’s works were very popular in Russia.

The name of Paul de Kock was mentioned numerous times by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novels, such as “The Gambler”, for example,

Dostoevsky used the plot of Paul de Kock’s novel “Husband, Wife, and Lover” in his story “The Eternal Husband”. The heroine of the Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Home of the Gentry” Varvara Pavlovna Lavretskaya, being an avid reader of French popular literature, preferred de Kock to all writers.

By the early 19th century, two-thirds of all publications in the home library of a Russian nobleman were in French. From 1801 to 1812, about half of the books in Saint Petersburg and Moscow bookstores were translated from French. French was even the language of choice for Alexander Pushkin’s first poems. His novel “Eugene Onegin” has the following lines,

Leo Tolstoy in his novel “War and Peace” described Prince Vasily as follows,

During the trial of 1826, many Decembrists testified in French.

Nowadays, the works of Paul de Kock are valuable as sketches of the life of the Paris lower and middle classes in the first half of the 19th century.

The book “The Barber of Paris” was purchased for the Turinsk Decembrists House Museum in 1993 to become part of a collection of rare books that was formed to create a library display in the office of the Decembrist Vasily Petrovich Ivashev.