One would suppose from Jacques Barzun’s introductory essay to this selection that this project,
which Restif originally imagined as 1,001
Parisian Nights, was conceived as a sort of documentary
experiment. An exhaustive catalogue of
the seamy nocturnal underworld of Paris in the late 18th century,
Restif’s extended rambles and the salacious tableaux he witnessed (and more
often than not inserted himself into as a sort of immaculate and irreproachable
moral authority – a pretty damn good joke in its own right) were allegedly duly
reported to “the Marquise”, a mysterious noblewoman with an apparently
bottomless desire to assist the poor, the disadvantaged, and the unavoidably
debauched. Barely 30 pages into this
selection – itself a portion of a much larger work – we’ve already met con artists,
brothel keepers, grave robbers, pickpockets, juvenile delinquents, murderers,
pedophiles, gay-baiters, child prostitutes, and “effeminate men”.
Restif (the
“de la Bretonne” was an affectation) was a tireless scribbler who, when he
wasn’t on the prowl for a suitable orifice, was consumed with writing about
what he found when he got there, and keeping precise records that, if we can
trust him as an erotic memoirist, rival those of his near contemporary, Giacomo
Casanova. On his own terms, this short,
fat, balding and swarthy fellow was a bit of a libertine, or as we might more
accurately describe his sort these days, a serial rapist. In these pages,
however, the idealized Monsieur Restif is much more interested in returning
seduced young maidens back into the arms of their worried parents than one
would suspect from what we know of his autobiographical portrayal in other
works.
The dust
jacket of my 1962 edition shows an amusingly clean drawing of Paris in broad
daylight that belies the dark and disturbing portrait of the nocturnal metropolis
that Restif is trying to convey. Reading the selections, I like to imagine what
a delightfully dark series of graphic storybooks this could make under the
pencil of a suitably talented illustrator (think of something akin to Dore’s
illustrations of London as a city of dreadful night).
We must
assume that there is a kernel of reality in the vision that Restif is
attempting to portray, but I am less inclined than Mr. Barzun to see Restif as
a social reformer (although he did, in fairness, support reformation – although
certainly not elimination – of prostitution in Paris) than as an exploitative
storyteller trading on and embellishing to lurid effect the dangers and
degeneracies of the lost and hopeless habitués
of the dark city. This is neither Henry Mayhew’s London nor Jacob Riis’s
New York, but rather an entertainment based on the debased sufferings of the lower
depths, in which the Marquise is the conscious stand-in for the titillated reader.
It is, for all that, quite entertaining, particularly when taken in small
doses.
