A travelling hawker who ostensibly sold pictures, but who concealed forbidden literature under his cloak, used to go through Villers-Cotterets two or three times a year, hobbling along with difficulty on two wooden legs, and giving out he was an old soldier.
The money that I had managed to extort from my poor mother had more than once been spent in these clandestine purchases; but a feeling of delicacy which was innate in me, and by reason of which there are not four out of the six hundred volumes I have written that the most scrupulous of mothers need hide from her daughter—this sentiment of delicacy, for which I give thanks to God, always caused me to throw far away from me such books at the tenth page or at the second picture.
But it was quite a different thing with Faublas. Faublas is, without gainsaying, a bad book from the point of view of morality; a delightful romance from the point of view of fancy; a romance full of originality, depicting a variety of types, somewhat exaggerated, no doubt, but which had their counterparts in the days of Louis XV.
So I felt as great an attraction towards Faublas as I had felt repugnance towards Thérèse philosophe, Felicia ou mes fredaines, those dirty lucubrations which persistently polluted the press throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century.
From that moment I discovered my vocation—one I had never recognised or even suspected until then—I wanted to become a second Faublas.
It is true I soon renounced the idea, and that idiocy has never been put down on the list of the many failings with which I have been charged.
I had prepared a magnificent theory, all cut and dried, of seductiveness, by the time Sunday in Whitsuntide came, and I was introduced, clad in my light blue coat and nankeen breeches, to the two charming Parisian girls.
Mademoiselle Laurence was tall, thin, willowy in figure, and in character she was of a bantering and indolent disposition. She was fair-haired, clear-skinned, and possessed the graceful taste of a Parisian woman: she, as I have said, was the good abbé's niece.
Mademoiselle Vittoria was pale, stout, slightly pitted with smallpox, broad-bosomed, wide-hipped, bold in her looks, representing exactly the Spanish type from Madrid, with her dead white complexion, her velvety eyes, and her supple figure.