Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist and art critic, born at Tarbes in 1811 and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1872. He was a central figure of French Romanticism and later a standard-bearer for l’art pour l’art, admired by Baudelaire and Flaubert. The line about chance comes from a piece of literary play: La Croix de Berny was a novel written in letters by four authors in rotation, and Gautier wrote the letters signed “Edgard de Meilhan” — which is part of why the sentence spent decades circulating with no name attached to it at all.