"Kock, Charles Paul de (1793-1871), French novelist, was born at Passy on the 21st of May 1793. He was a posthumous cild, his father, abanker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock began life as a banker's clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians. He died in Paris on the 27th of April 1871. He began to write for the stage very early, and composed many operatic libretti. His first novel, L'Enfant de ma Femme (1811), was published at his own expense. In 1820 he began his long and sucessful series of novels dealing with Parisian life with Georgette, ou La Mere de Tabellion. His period of greatest and most successful activity was the Restoration and the early days of Louis Philippe. He was relatively less popular in France itself than abroad, where he was considered as the special painter of life in Paris. Major Pendenis's remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for thirty years except Paul de Kock, who certainly made him laugh, is likely to remain one of the most durable of his testimonials, and may be classed with the legendary question of a foreign sovereign to a Frenchman who was paying his respects, "Vous venez de Paris et vous deves savoir des nouvelles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock?" The disappearance of the grisette and of the cheap dissipation described by Henri Murger practically made Paul de Kock obsolete. But to the student of manners his portraiture of low and middle class life in the first half of the 19th century at Paris still has its value." - 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica [1911]

"[Kock was] the prolific and immensely popular author of rollicking, risky, and more often frankly coarse frequently sentimental, and fundamentally good-natured novels. Written with an untiring comic vigour which made up for their complete lack of style, they were good pictures of the life and amusements of the people of Paris and the country c. 1825-45. They were read and enjoyed in England (by Macaulay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning among others..." - Harvey & Heseltine, Oxford Companion to French Literature