Facts of the end of winter

At the Poetry Foundation, the one and only Paul La Farge takes a look at two Frenchies from yesteryear, Félix Fénéon (Novels in Three Lines) and Victor Segalen (Stèles). A taste:

One might suspect that Fénéon was a fictional character, if only his biography did not contain so many improbable contradictions. A Frenchman born in Turin, Italy, he placed first in a civil service exam and went to work for the War Department, where he delighted so much in writing reports that, when he had completed his own, he would write those of his colleagues. At the same time, Fénéon was a committed anarchist. He took over the Anarchist Review when its editor went into hiding, and he was a friend to Émile Henry, who threw a bomb into the aptly named Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing 20 strangers. Fénéon himself was suspected of bombing a different café, and was arrested when the police found mercury and detonators in his office at the War Department. (He claimed his father had found them in the street.)