Paul Anthelme Bourde
Paul Anthelme Bourde was a French journalist, author and colonial administrator. Selftaught, he became a respected contributor to Le Temps, writing on a broad range of subjects. He was hostile to the poets associated with the Decadent movement and positive about colonial enterprises. He did much to improve agriculture, particularly the cultivation of olives, in Tunisia.
Paul Anthelme Bourde was born at Voissant, Isre, onMay 1851. His father was a deputy sergeant in the Savoy customs. After Savoy was annexed by France in 1860, the family moved to northern France near the Belgian border, where Bourde studied at the local school in Harcy. He moved on to the Petit Sminaire of Charleville, where he was a classmate of Arthur Rimbaud and the future novelist Jules Mary. He was expelled from the sminaire in 1866 for having planned with his friends to escape and travel to Abyssinia to search for the sources of the Nile. Rimbaud took the plan seriously and began to learn the Amharic language.
Source: Wikipedia