Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 17]
Figure 7: Part of a key to the anagrams in Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans: Ouvrage traduit de l'Arabe du voyageur Krinelbol (Amsterdam, 1746), attributed to Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle and to Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon, fils. Photo courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
references are obvious, but others are ambiguous, and some are unexplained. In fact, the keys occasionally contradict each other or contain manuscript corrections. So reading with a key becomes a kind of puzzle-solving; and the heart of the mystery turns out in the end to be "le secret du roi"—the private life of the king, which is the ultimate mainspring of power. The Vie privée de Louis XV, a best-selling libelle of the 1780s, incorporated all this literature from the 1740s, often word for word, in a four-volume history of the entire reign.
Sophisticated literature of this sort might seem to be far removed from the raw gossip that coursed through the cafés, but by 1750 these "public noises" conveyed the same themes: the ignominy of the king, the degradation of him by his mistresses, and the manipulation of the mistresses by vile courtiers. Consider a few examples taken from police reports on what Parisians were saying about Mme. de Pompadour in 1749:25
Le Bret: After running down Mme. de Pompadour by loose talk in various locales, he said that she had driven the king crazy by putting all sorts of notions in his head. The bitch is
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