Born in Italy to a Swiss family, he lived in Naples during the crucial decades of the mid-19th century, chronicling brigandage and the Camorra. He studied throughout Europe and taught comparative history at the University of Geneva. He wrote a Histoire générale de la littérature moderne, but was above all an eclectic writer, a translator of Goethe and Ariosto, a playwright, historian, and essayist, as well as a novelist and short story writer.
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