Catulle Mendès (22 May 1841 – 8 February 1909) was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Mendès was born in Bordeaux.[1] After childhood and adolescence in Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1859 and quickly became one of the proteges of the poet Théophile Gautier. He promptly attained notoriety with the publication in the La Revue fantaisiste (1861) of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs.