Correspondance d’Eulalie. ~ ou Tableau du Libertinage de Paris. Avec la vie de plusieurs filles célèbres de ce siècle. ‘Londres’: Jean Nourse, 1785.
8vo (144 × 80mm), pp. 214, [2] (blank); 168, complete with half-title. Green morocco, gilt, c. 1900. Ex Libris Albert Hooper. An excellent copy.
A scandalous epistolary novel purporting to be the genuine correspondence of fashionable Parisian prostitutes, courtesans and actresses in 1782 and 1783. It is full of detail on life in the theatres, on the racecourse and in the salons of the fashionable rich. There are elegant orgies, unexpected lesbian encounters, cross-dressing, petty theft and continual financial worries. This is the expanded edition (with 16 additional letters) of Lettres de Julie à Eulalie (Londres, 1784). It includes erotic and comic verses and songs.
It was widely read and extremely popular. James Boswell owned a copy (Bibliotheca Boswelliana, 1825), p. 24, 739. The imprint is certainly false, and the BnF catalogue suggests a German origin on the basis of typography. The occasional attribution to Mirabeau is incorrect, arising from confusion of the earlier title of his novel Ma Conversion (see Kearney, History of Erotic Literature, p. 77). Gay I, 819: ‘Lettres d’une courtisanne, qui après de longs déréglements, épousa un lord anglais, et devint une femme vertueuse’. Worldcat locates three copies only (BL, BnF and Anna Amalia Library, Weimar)