Literary Birthday – 6 May – Gaston Leroux

Gaston Leroux was born on 6 May 1868 and died on 15 April 1927.

Gaston Leroux Quotes

1. All I wanted was to be loved for myself.
2. There are times where excessive innocence seems so monstrous that it becomes hateful.
3. And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.
4. An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.
5. He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman.
6. He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.
7. In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.
8. None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy.
9. Everyone dies. I just choose the time and place for some of them!

Gaston Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. He is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera. His 1908 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries. Leroux was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1909. According to Wikipedia: ‘Leroux’s contribution to French detective fiction is considered a parallel to those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the United Kingdom and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States.’

Source for photograph: Unidentified photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:G._LEROUX.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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