Illustration by Gustave Dore for Le Capitaine Fracasse by Pierre Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)French; Writer; poet; painter; art critic. Gautier was a defender of Romanticism; Gautiers work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism; Symbolism; Decadence and Modernism. Captain Fracasse (Le Capitaine Fracasse) is an 1863 novel by the French writer Théophile Gautier. It is an adventure novel set in the seventeenth century.