The Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas

First published in 1786-1790, this satire on the French aristocracy treats of the amorous adventures of a very young French aristocrat at the very end of the Ancien Regime. Faublas, not yet sixteen, disguises himself as a girl for a joke, and goes to a ball. The Marquis of B*** lusts after him, and brings him home with his wife, hoping to seduce him. But it is his wife the Marchioness de B*** who takes the boy's virginity. Ready, like any healthy teenager, to sleep with anyone who shows willing, he is soon involved in a complex web of disguises and pseudonyms. This gives rise to a sequence of farcical episodes, as he tries to satisfy three different women, along with occasional one-night stands. Even marriage does not put an end to his philandering antics. Farce soon shades into melodrama, and at last into tragedy.

Note: A long digression near the beginning is almost a separate work about the Polish resistance to Russian conquest. Seemingly irrelevant, it turns out to be of great importance to the plot.