Polish · 1761–1815
Potocki was a Polish count, an ethnographer, a Knight of Malta, and the first man in Poland to go up in a hot-air balloon. He travelled through Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Spain and Mongolia, published serious work on Slavic prehistory, ran a free press in Warsaw, and was attached to a Russian embassy to China that got no further than the border. He wrote his novel in French across two decades and never finished arranging it. In December 1815, at his estate in Podolia, in a long depression, he filed the silver knob off a sugar bowl into a bullet, had it blessed by his chaplain, and shot himself. The manuscript was scattered: parts survived only in a Polish translation, and a complete French text was not reconstructed until the 1980s, with a definitive edition appearing in 2006.