☛A French writer of extravagantly outrageous satirical novels, only one of which we have found translated into English.
A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle; occasion’d by his reading books treating of magick, the black-art, demoniacks, conjurors, witches, hobgoblins, etc. London: J. Morphew, 1711.
Mital ou Avantures incroyables, et toute-fois, &c. Ces Avantures contiennent quinze Relations d’un voyage rempli d’un tres-grand nombre de differentes sortes de Prodiges, de Merveilles, d’Usages, de Coûtumes, d’Opinions, & de Divertissemens. Paris: Charles le Clerc, 1708.
Gomgam; ou, L’Homme prodigieux, transporté dans l'air, sur la terre et sous les eaux. Livre véritablement nouveau. Titetutefnosy. Seconde édition, augmentée du dénouement de l'histoire du Docteur Dirto, de ses sentences & jugemens, de ses bons mots, d'une manière extraordinaire inventée pour punir un Satyrique, d'une figure qui en représente l'exécution, & de plusieurs autres. Tome premier. Paris: Pierre Prault, 1713.—This is called Volume I, but we have not found a second volume anywhere, and we wonder whether the volume number is itself one of M. Bordelon’s amusing jokes.
Champavert: Contes immoraux. “Whether Champavert were a fictitious or real personage, I know not; there is, however, a long circumstantial account of his suicide here given; and I trust, for the honor of France, that the Lycanthrope actually lived and died in the manner described in the book.” —Thackeray.
“These seven stories, though not immoral, as they
profess to be, in the defiant manner of the day, are
as extraordinary as any production of the human brain.
All are studies in horrors and iniquities; above all,
in the shedding of blood. Written by anyone else they
would be revolting, for they spare no detail of
monstrous deeds; they would be pitiless but for their
immense self-pity; cruel but for their irony, which is
a bitter, personal, and at times magnificent
arraignment of things. They are crude, extravagant,
built up out of crumbling and far-sought materials;
they are deliberately improbable, and the persons who
sin and suffer in them are males all brain and females
all idols or ideals. They are as far from reality as
intention and style can make them; a world of
yari-colored puppets swinging on unregulated wires.
And yet these violences and crudities and all this
digging in graveyards and fumbling in the dead souls
of the treacherous and the unforgiving, have something
in them or under them, a sincerity, a real hatred of
evil and unholy things, which keeps us from turning
away, as our first impulse may well be, in mere
disgust. A man, suffering from some deadly misery,
leaps before us in ironical gymnastics, and comes down
with his mortal laugh, a clown, in the arena. That is
what makes the book tragic, a buffoon's criticism of
life; there is philosophy in it, and an angry pathos.”
—Horace
Holley in The
Forum,
1915.
1833
edition (the first).
1870
édition compacte.