 He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.Gautier was born on 30 August 1811 in Tarbes (France), capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département (southwestern France).His father was Jean-Pierre Gautier, a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Cocard.