Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo on August 16, 1860. He returned to France at the age of six. After failing his Abitur, he worked as a copy boy for Charles Ephrussi, the director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts ,  wrote articles for several small magazines and corresponded with Gustave Kahn. In December 1881 Laforgue got a job as a lecturer with Empress Augusta, the grandmother of the later Wilhelm II. He accompanied her to Baden, Koblenz and Helsingör until the poet, suffering from tuberculosis, left Berlin. Shortly before, he had met a young English woman, Leah Lee, whom he married on December 31, 1886. The couple moved to Paris, where he died in 1887 at the age of 27. Laforgue is considered to be one of the inventors of free verse, which combined melancholy, humor and linguistic familiarity with a pessimistic worldview.