Gustave Henri Joseph Le Rouge was a French writer who embodied the evolution of modern science fiction at the beginning of the 20th century, by moving it away from the juvenile adventures of Jules Verne and incorporating real people into his stories, thus bridging the gap between Vernian and Wellsian science fiction.
Léon Gustave Schlumberger was a French historian and numismatist who specialised in the era of the crusades and the Byzantine Empire. His Numismatique de l'Orient Latin (1878–82) is still considered the principal work on the coinage of the crusades. He was awarded the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1903. A large portion of his extensive Crusader coin collection is housed in the Cabinet des Médailles a department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
Jean-Nicolas-Gustave Van Nieuwen-Huysen was a Belgian playwright, librettist and translator of opera librettos. Born in Brussels, he studied law and earned a doctorate at the State University of Leuven. Since he had no desire to work as a lawyer, he devoted himself to a career as a playwright. He published a large number of plays. His first plays were staged from 1829 to 1834 in Brussels, which he left for Paris to work with librettist Alphonse Royer. Operas where Vaëz was involved as a librettist and translator are Lucia di Lammermoor (1839), La favorite and Rita, ou Le mari battu by Gaetano Donizetti (1840), and Jérusalem by Giuseppe Verdi. He died in Paris on 12 March 1862.
Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida, better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, was a Spanish Romantic poet and writer, also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented in drawing. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in Spanish literature, and is considered by some as the most read writer after Miguel de Cervantes. He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier. He was associated with the romanticism and post-romanticism movements and wrote while realism was enjoying success in Spain. He was moderately well known during his life, but it was after his death that most of his works were published. His best known works are the Rhymes and the Legends, usually published together as Rimas y leyendas. These poems and tales are essential to the study of Spanish literature and common reading for high-school students in Spanish-speaking countries.
