The
Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas
By
Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray
First published in 1786-1790, this
satire on the French aristocracy treats of the amorous adventures of a very
young French aristocrat at the very end of the Ancien
Regime. Faublas, not yet sixteen, disguises himself
as a girl for a joke, and goes to a ball. The Marquis of B*** lusts after him,
and brings him home with his wife, hoping to seduce him. But it is his wife the
Marchioness de B*** who takes the boy's virginity. Ready, like any healthy
teenager, to sleep with anyone who shows willing, he is soon involved in a
complex web of disguises and pseudonyms (see below). This gives rise to a sequence of farcical episodes, as he tries
to satisfy three different women, along with occasional one-night stands. Even
marriage does not put an end to his philandering antics. Farce soon shades into
melodrama, and at last into tragedy.
Quotation:
The woman who kept the Francis
Street establishment was a widow, a Mrs Richardson, but never upon any occasion
did I see her look into a book. Whether it was she herself who collected and
arranged the library, I cannot say. I only hope, for the honour of her sex, it
was not; because such a mass of obscenity and profligacy was (out of Holywell Street,
the Jewish establishment in London) never put together. How booksellers were
found to publish the books it is difficult to say, or how they escaped
prosecution. There was not a book in the whole library but Mrs Richardson was
acquainted with its character, a fact which she never denied.
One of them, for instance, was
the History of
Mrs Leeson or in other
words the history of the infamous Peg Plunkett, who figured during the
viceroyalty of Lord Manners, and of whom the anecdote of 'Manners, you dogs,'
is yet told. The History of the Chevalier
de Faublas was also there, and another revolting abomination
under the nickname of Aristotle.
-- William Carleton, Autobiography
Note:
A long digression near the beginning is almost
a separate work about the Polish resistance to Russian conquest. Seemingly
irrelevant, it turns out to be of great importance to the plot.
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