French writer.

His familiar origins are dark. Some sources point out that he was a natural son of a married aristocrat, Maria-Charlotte-Félicité de Faudoas-Barbazan of Segnanville, and of her lover Horace François Bastien Sébastiani de la Porta, a Napoleonic general and diplomat. The truth is that he was born in Paris in 1818 and that, after being abandoned, he was adopted and received the surname Gloux.

Still being a boy, he enlisted as a cabin boy on a ship that took him around Europe and America, and at the age of 17, he enlisted in the Royal Navy. In 1893, while he served in South America, he deserted and started a life full of adventures all around Latin-America, that later on he reflected in his novels: he fought against dictators, he was sold as a slave, he worked as a pearl fisherman, gold searcher and trapper, he lived together with American natives, etc. Back in Europe in 1847, he travelled around Spain, Turkey and the Caucasus, in 1848 he was granted amnesty by the French govern, and he returned to Mexico, searching new experiences.

After installing himself again in France, in 1854 he married and started writing under the pseudonym Gustave Aimard. He became a prolific and successful writer of adventure novels that he published in a serialised form, in newspapers like Le Moniteur , La Presse , La Liberté or Le Public and, subsequently, they were compiled into volumes. Nevertheless, at the end of the 60s, his fame declined and he tried to solve it by writing in collaboration with the also novelist Jules Berlioz d'Auriac (1820-1913) a series of novels about the West conquest. In his last years, he travelled around Brazil and Paraguay, but a serious disease made him return to Paris, where he passed away poor and insane in a psychiatric hospital in 1883.

His novels did not take long in being translated and published in Spain. Along the 60s of the 19th Century, Charles Bailly Baillière edited La ley de Lych, Los merodeadores de fronteras, Los tiradores indígenas, Los filibusteros and La fiebre del oro, amongst others; in the 70s the Imprenta y Librería of José Gaspar Maristany edited Bala franca, El bisonte blanco or Los tramperos del Arkansas; and also in this last quarter of the century, Salvador Manero Bayarri published Mariami la indiana and El fuerte Península. During the XX century, editorials Maucci, Molino and Espasa Calpe, and collections like the Revista Literaria Novelas y Cuentos, published these and other works of Aimard.