The Bohemians

Rediscovered by Robert Darnton and brought gloriously back to life in Vivian Folkenflik's translation, The Bohemians at last takes its place as a major work of eighteenth century libertinism.

While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is almost completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Bohémiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half dozen copies are available in libraries throughout the world. This edition, the first in English, opens a window into the world of garret poets, literary adventurers, down-and-out philosophers, and Grub Street hacks writing in the waning days of the Ancien Régime.

The Bohemians tells the tale of a troupe of vagabond writer-philosophers and their sexual partners, wandering through the countryside of Champagne accompanied by a donkey loaded with their many unpublished manuscripts. They live off the land—for the most part by stealing chickens from peasants. They deliver endless philosophic harangues, one more absurd than the other, bawl and brawl like schoolchildren, copulate with each other, and pause only to gobble up whatever they can poach from the barnyards along their route.

Full of lively prose, parody, dialogue, double entendre, humor, outrageous incidents, social commentary, and obscenity, The Bohemians is a tour de force. As Robert Darnton writes in his introduction to the book, it spans several genres and can be read simultaneously as a picaresque novel, a roman à clef, a collection of essays, a libertine tract, and an autobiography. Rediscovered by Darnton and brought gloriously back to life in Vivian Folkenflik's translation, The Bohemians at last takes its place as a major work of eighteenth-century libertinism.

Introduction
Translator's Note
List of Main Characters

Chapter 1. The Legislator Bissot Renounces Chicanery in Favor of Philosophy
Chapter 2. The Two Brothers Wander on the Plains of Champagne
Chapter 3. Supper Better Than Dinner
Chapter 4. Who Were These People Supping Under the Stars on the Plains of Champagne?
Chapter 5. Reveille; The Troupe Marches Forward; Unremarkable Adventures
Chapter 6. Cock-Crow
Chapter 7. After Which, Try to Say There Are No Ghosts . . .
Chapter 8. The Denouement
Chapter 9. Nocturnal Adventures That Deserve to See the Light of Day, and Worthy of an Academician's Pen
Chapter 10. The Terrible Effects of Causes
Chapter 11. Uncivil Dissertations
Chapter 12. Parallel of Mendicant and Proprietary Monks
Chapter 13. Various Projects Highly Important to the Public Weal
Chapter 14. On Hospitality
Chapter 15. Morning Matins at the Charterhouse
Chapter 16. Panegyric of the Clergy
Chapter 17. A Mouse with Only One Hole Is Easy to Take
Chapter 18. How Lungiet Was Interrupted by a Miracle
Chapter 19. Which Will Not Be Long
Chapter 20. A Pilgrim's Narrative
Chapter 21. Continuation of the Pilgrim's Narrative

Notes