The Bohemians

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

translator’s note As a translator, I have approached this novel from a literary perspective , coming first to the text. While Robert Darnton necessarily focuses on Pelleport’s personal, literary, and political targets as “thinly disguised” people in a roman a clé, I have presented the Bohemians as fictional characters in the great tradition of the European comic novel, individuated through their voices and through the narrator’s descriptions, within the freewheeling connections of their Bohemian existence. My goal in the translation and annotation is to give a sense of the engaged and semi-complicit relationship Pelleport establishes with his reader through direct interrogative, indirect discourse, political in-jokes, cultural allusions, parodies, and literary pastiches. I have worked to convey the complex satiric field around Pelleport’s former friends, his family, and the socioeconomic abuses of the Ancien Régime. The narrator’s intricate, even obsessional cross-referencing allows him to create a remarkably far-ranging shared contextual web with his longed-for reader, thanks to Pelleport’s involvement in political intrigue, his philosophical awareness, and his familiarity with the classics. The associative pattern of these multiple references echoes the open-ended conversations characteristic of the novel. Robert Darnton is responsible for the notes concerning Pelleport and the libellistes. I have annotated the other historical and contemporary references as well as classical and literary allusions. When Pelleport misquotes a Latin text, perhaps from memory, I have noted the misquotation and translated both versions. References to living people and historical personages, whether under their real or altered names, enable Pelleport to create the mesh of privatepublic information-sharing and withholding that appeals to his imagined reader, as it would have to readers of his libelles. Contemporary references include Rousseau, Voltaire, and Mirabeau in coded form, as well as named authors. Such puzzles are part of the enjoyment of reading political satire: the satisfaction of identifying more of them offers a sense of participation in the wicked fun of political gossip. At one point Pelleport’s narrator, annoyed at the interruptions by a listener-reader protesting at digressions, replies that he intends his novel to “touch on everything”; my goal has been to appreciate as fully as we can the context, if not of “everything,” then at least as much as possible of this imaginary world. Beyond embodying the much-resented Brissot, his brother, the Dupont women, Linguet, and the archvillain Morande, the various characters in The Bohemians take substantially different forms as presented in the main structure by the narrator-marquis, from the characters in the linear autobiographical tale told by the Pilgrim-poet. For example, as Darnton has shown, Pelleport satirizes his former friend Brissot de Warville as both the ex-lawyer “Bissot” in the main narrative and the ragpicker “Bissoto de Guerreville” in the Pilgrim’s tale. But the novel develops Bissot beyond his early presentation: foolish though he may be, his speech to the troupe’s Carthusian hosts not only frames the troupe’s Bohemian vagabondage but indicts the social breakdown that creates their sense of marginality and identifies it as a growing threat; literary ragpicker Bissoto de Guerreville is capable of no such argument. Brissot’s wife, Félicité Dupont, is fictionalized both as Voragine’s daughter Félicité in Champagne and as Bissoto’s Quakerish wife Nancy in London. But although Nancy is mentioned as witnessing the Pilgrim’s sexualized nose at a Quaker meeting, the Bohemienne Félicité’s mock-naive narrative of her bed-trick and rape by the wicked Mordanes (in a document supposedly found in an archive by the novel’s narrator) bears witness to the so-called historical veracity of the whole novel and its identification of the knavish Mordanes rather than Bissot as chief villain. Thanks to Félicité’s documented voice, Mordanes as rapist becomes an eroticized menace, as the narrator shows him to be a teacher of murder: until he teaches Bissot’s brother to enjoy killing innocent ducklings, Tifarès has been a largely sympathetic if credulous youth. On the other hand, within the tale the Pilgrim is telling to the Bohemians (including Tifarès), the treatment of Bissoto’s brother is completely satirical. “Bissoto” in the Pilgrim’s tale comes to a far more unsavory end than Bissot, whose attempts at intellectual discourse earn some interest, if not sympathy. As for Félicité’s Bohemienne mother, the governessy stew-maker Voragine, her managerial skills make Bohemian vagabond life feasible; her interventions structure the chaotic interruptions of...