Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 18]

raising hell, he said, because of some poems that attack her. Does she expect to be praised while she is wallowing in crime?

Jean-Louis Le Clerc: Made the following remarks in the Café de Procope: That there never has been a worse king; that the court, the ministers and the Pompadour make the king do shameful things, which utterly disgust his people.

François Philippe Merlet: Accused of having said in the tennis court of Veuve Gosseaume that Richelieu and the Pompadour were destroying the reputation of the king; that he was not well regarded by his people, since he was driving them to ruin; and that he had better beware, because the twentieth tax could cause some mischief to befall him.

Fleur de Montagne: Among other things, he said that the king's extravagant expenditures showed that he didn't give a f—— for his people; that he knows they are destitute and yet he is piling on another tax, as if to thank them for all the services they have rendered him. They must be crazy in France, he added, to put up with . . . He whispered the rest into someone's ear.

The congruence of themes from the mauvais propos and the libelles should not be surprising, because talking and reading about private lives and public affairs were inseparable activities. It was a public reading of a libelle that touched off the seditious talk in the wigmaker's shop. Moreover, "public noises" fed into the confection of the texts. According to the police, the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de Perse was generated from the information gathered in the circle of Mme. de Vieuxmaison, much as the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la république des lettres en France came out of the salon of Mme. Doublet. Mme. de Vieuxmaison appears in the police files as "small, very white, blond, with a perfidious physiognomy . . . She is very clever and being [also] very wicked, she writes poems and couplets against everyone . . . Her circle . . . is the most dangerous in Paris and is strongly suspected of having produced the Anecdotes de Perse."²⁶

The most remarkable example of talk translated into text was Tanastès, a roman à clef about the king and the three sisters by Marie Madeleine Joseph Bonafon, a twenty-eight-year-old chambermaid in Versailles. The police could not believe that a female domestic servant could compose such a work. Having traced it back to her, locked her into the Bastille, and summoned her for cross-examination, they found themselves faced with an enigma: a working-woman author—could it be true? They kept returning to this question in the interrogations. Had Mlle. Bonafon really written books? they asked. Yes, she replied, and she named them: Tanastès, the beginning of another novel entitled Le baron de XXX, several poems, and three unpublished plays. Baffled, the police continued questioning:

Asked what it was that gave her a taste for writing? Hadn't she consulted someone who was familiar with the composition of books in order to learn how to go about organizing the ones she intended to write?

Answered that she did not consult anyone; that since she reads a great deal, this had given her a desire to write; that she had imagined, moreover, that she could make a little money by writing . . .

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