Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society

[Page 20]

outdid each other at improvising bawdy ballads and drinking songs at first in Gallet's grocery store, later in the Café du Caveau. Their songs made the rounds of taverns, echoed in the streets, and found their way into popular theaters—at the Foire Saint-Germain, along the vaudeville shows of the boulevards, and ultimately in the Opéra Comique. At a more plebeian level, ragged street-singers, playing fiddles and hurdy-gurdies, entertained crowds at the Pont Neuf, the Quai des Augustins, and other strategic locations. Paris was suffused with songs. In fact, as the saying went, the entire kingdom could be described as "an absolute monarchy tempered by songs."²⁹

In such an environment, a catchy song could spread like wildfire; and, as it spread, it grew—inevitably, because it acquired new phrasing in the course of oral transmission and because everyone could join in the game of grafting new stanzas onto the old. The new verses were scribbled on scraps of paper and traded in cafés just like the poems and anecdotes diffused by the nouvellistes. When the police frisked prisoners in the Bastille, they confiscated large quantities of this material, which can still be inspected in boxes at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal—tiny bits of paper covered with scribbling and carried about triumphantly, until the fatal moment when a police inspector, armed with a lettre de cachet, commanded, "Empty your pockets."³⁰ A typical scrap of verse, the latest stanzas to "Qu'une bâtarde de catin"—one of the most popular songs attacking Mme. de Pompadour, the king, and court—was seized from the upper left vest pocket of Pidansat de Mairobert during his interrogation in the Bastille. (See Figure 8.)³¹

Mairobert lived like a literary hack—"rue des Cordeliers, at a laundrywoman's place on the third floor," according to his police dossier—and described himself as "without fortune, reduced to what he could provide by his talent."³² But he frequented the elegant company in Mme. Doublet's salon, and other song collectors belonged to the highest ranks of the court. The greatest of them all was the comte de Maurepas, minister of the navy and the king's household, one of the most powerful men in Versailles. Maurepas epitomized the court style of politics under Louis XV. Witty, canny, and unscrupulous, he covered his maneuvering with an air of gaiety that endeared him to the king. He also held on to Louis'

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