Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
[Page 21]
Figure 8: The police lifted this scrap of paper from a pocket of the abbé Guyard when they frisked him in the Bastille on July 10, 1749. The verse was dictated to Guyard by Pierre Sigorgne, a professor in the University of Paris, who had memorized a whole repertory of anti-government songs and poems and declaimed them to his students. This poem, a burlesque edict by the parlement of Toulouse, attacks the recent twentieth tax and various abuses of power, which it attributes to the immorality of the king as exemplified by his affair with the three daughters of the marquis de Nesle. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 11690, 1749.
favor by regaling him with the latest songs, even songs that made fun of Maurepas himself and especially those that ridiculed his rivals.33
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