The Flower Girl of the Château d’Eau, Vol. 2
Charles Paul de Kock
The Flower Girl of the Château d’Eau, Volume 2 is the second volume of a novel by Charles Paul de Kock (1793-1871), the French popular novelist whose enormous output of Parisian comic and romantic fiction dominated the French popular novel market across the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
De Kock specialized in light comic novels set in contemporary Paris and the surrounding French countryside. His books combined romantic plot, comic characters drawn from the various social classes of Parisian life, and the kind of sentimental and humorous treatment that the French popular novel audience of the period favored. He was enormously successful commercially across his long career and was translated into many languages including English.
The Flower Girl of the Château d’Eau follows the typical de Kock pattern with a young Parisian woman of humble background, the various complications and romantic possibilities her circumstances produce, and the eventual resolution that the comic romance genre required. The Château d’Eau was a Paris landmark, a monumental fountain in the place du Château d’Eau, now place de la République.
