Camille Mauclair

Séverin Faust (December 29, 1872, Paris – April 23, 1945), better known by his pseudonym Camille Mauclair, was a French poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, and art critic.

Mauclair was a great admirer of Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom several works were devoted, as well as Maurice Maeterlinck. He was initially a poet and novelist. His poetry attracted some attention, and was set to music by Ernest Bloch, Gustave Charpentier, and Ernest Chausson and Nadia Boulanger. His best-known novel is Le Soleil des morts (1898), a roman à clef containing fictionalized portraits of leading avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians of the 1890s, that has in retrospect been seen as an important historical document of the fin de siècle. He also wrote several non-fiction books about music including Schumann (1906), The Religion of Music (1909), The History of European Music from 1850-1914 (1914) and The Heroes of the Orchestra (1921) which contributed greatly to French awareness of musical trends in turn-of-the-century Paris.