It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Interested in poetry and authorship he became involved writing poetry reviews and was part of a small newspaper. By the 1890s he had begun writing plays under the name Courteline for the theaters of Montmartre where he lived. The overall tone of his works was satirical in nature often making fun of everything from the wealthy elitists of Paris to the bloated government bureaucracies.