Word: restif
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...NUITS-DE PARIS by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. 375 pages. Random House...
...18th century, Paris was the largest city on the Continent. It was also filthy, racked by poverty and raddled by crime. Through the dark jungle of Paris' nights slipped a curious cloaked observer, Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. Part journalist, part novelist, part police spy, Restif was described by Havelock Ellis as "a gutter Rousseau." and has become something of a literary cult figure in France today. In Les Nuits de Paris, here translated into English for the first time, Restif created a unique record of the lower depths in all their gamy variety...
Burglars, lovers, beggars, whores, pickpockets and girl pinchers moving through the crowds, a condemned murderer broken on the wheel, thieves stealing food with a pole through an open window, medical students digging up cadavers in deserted graveyards, little girls and boys sold into prostitution-Restif saw them all. And he set them down as he saw them, in odd, choppy verbal snapshots, some grotesque, a few funny, but all in appalling contrast to the occasional fine lady or powdered gentleman whose carriage splatters them with mud or casually kills someone...
...damned comical about one of Jean Simmons' admirers asking her for a pic ture of her feet? . . . Du Maurier in his classic Trilby devoted page after page to descriptions of Trilby's beautiful feet. In the novels of such romantics as Théophile Gautier, Restif de la Bretonne, Pierre Louÿs, Sacher-Masoch and Emile Zola, the heroine's feet are always lovely, frequently bare, and often kissed by the hero...
...intellectual conflicts of his time moved him as other men are moved by pain or fear, compelled him to state simple, fundamental truths, although he suffered the torments of the damned in doing so. Remaining ten essays in the volume trace the Rousseau tradition through the careers of Restif de la Bretonne, Alexandre de Tilly, Hugo and others to its modern representative in Marcel Proust. Restif, "the gutter Rousseau," wrote the 18th Century equivalent of True Confession stories, carried Rousseau's ideas to the logical absurdity of idealizing prostitution. A more impressive figure, Tilly was a minor Casanova...