Les Fêtes roulantes, ou les regrets des petites rues

First edition of this work published by the Société du Bout-du-Banc, the celebrated literary salon presided over by Mademoiselle Jeanne-Françoise Quinault and the Comte de Caylus. This intimate circle, originally comprising eight members, would gather on Mondays at dinner to exchange ideas and to write; at the close of each meal, every distinguished guest was required to set down a few lines — whether in the coarse poissard style or in a more refined vein — on paper. It was in this context that Les Fêtes roulantes, ou les regrets des petites rues came into being, in the wake of the celebrations held in Paris in honour of the Dauphin's second marriage, to Marie-Josèphe de Saxe.

Pastiche binding in plum half-shagreen, spine with five raised bands framed by gilt dotted fillets and six compartments decorated with gilt fillets and fleurons, marbled paper boards, gilt top edge, pastedowns and endpapers in shell-pattern marbled paper.

Some minor rubbing to the paper of the lower board, corners slightly bumped.

"In his youth, the Comte de Caylus had paid considerable tribute to the literature of fairy tales, which the translations from Arabic and Persian by Galland and Pétis de la Croix had brought into fashion; one does not find him again in these artificial creations, to which he returned when he was nearly seventy. But in the intervening years his character as a writer emerged and declared itself in accordance with his manners and tastes, and in how propitious a milieu! The Société du bout du banc, that academy of Gallic ribaldry presided over by Mademoiselle Quinault; those suppers at which an inkwell served as centrepiece, and which La Chaussée, d'Armenonville, Voisenon, Moncrif, the Grand Prior of Vendôme, Duclos, Salley, and Crébillon fils enlivened with their bawdy and bantering wit. All men of letters with little taste for philosophy, all content to let the world go its own way and finding it perfectly satisfactory as it was, all of that sacred flock of Epicurus, somewhat transformed by Circe, in which each member is satisfied — or very nearly — with what their presiding lady declared sufficient for Duclos, the least fastidious among them. The popular literature of the eighteenth century — that is to say, literature which took the common people as the subject of its observations and tableaux — was born within this company of mirth and folly, and the Comte de Caylus was its natural father and its foster father; it took its first lively flights in those "Écosseuses" (1739), those "Étrennes de la Saint-Jean" (1742), those "Mémoires de l'Académie des colporteurs", those "Avantures des bals des Bois", those "Fêtes roulantes" (1748), a veritable magic lantern of Parisian popular life [...]"

Avertissement, "Mémoires et réflexions du comte de Caylus", 1874