Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 16]

from sin by confession and Communion. But his confessors would not admit him to the Eucharist unless he renounced his mistresses, and he refused to renounce them after 1738, when he began openly to exhibit his adultery with Mme. de Mailly. From that time on, Louis never again took Easter Communion and never again touched the sick. The Metz crisis revived hope that he would recover his spiritual potency, but its denouement, the death of Mme. de Châteauroux, and the succession of mistresses that began with the installation of Mme. de Pompadour in 1745 signaled the end of Louis's effectiveness as a mediator between his people and their angry God. That was the conclusion reached by Bernard after declaiming The Three Sisters to his audience in the wigmaker's shop.

At this point, I should pause to deal with an objection. You may concede that the police reports provide evidence about the public's fear of divine retribution for the king's sins, but you also might protest that my version of "The Three Sisters" does not necessarily coincide with the story recounted in the 1740s by Parisians. Perhaps in a fit of postmodern permissiveness, I simply made it up.

I did not. Like many of you, I deplore the current tendency to mix fiction with fact, and I disagree with those who take liberties with evidence on the grounds that history requires unavoidable doses of tropes.²³ I therefore looked far and wide for a book entitled Les trois soeurs. I failed to find it, but I did come up with four other books published between 1745 and 1750 that tell the story of Louis' love affairs. They are all romans à clef, or novels in which real persons appear as fictitious characters. The story may be set in Africa (Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans, 1747), Asia (Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de Perse, 1745), fairyland (Tanastès, conte allégorique, 1745), or an exotic island (Voyage à Amatonthe, 1750). But they all read like a commentary on current events, and they all condemn the king. The story of "The Three Sisters" as I recounted it is a faithful synopsis of Les amours de Zeokinizul, and it fits the narrative line of all the others.²⁴

The meaning of those novels for their readers can be ascertained with some accuracy, because they all have keys. A collection of keys is available in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 7067, and many of the copies of the novels have keys printed at the end, entered in handwriting, or inserted in the binding. (See Figure 7.) Decoding with a key, however, turns out to be a less mechanistic process than you might expect. If you work through a novel with a key in hand, you find yourself reading simultaneously at different levels and reading between the lines. A stilted story can come alive, once it is found to conceal another, naughtier story; and the inside stories proliferate as you penetrate deeper and deeper into the text. Some

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