Books: Notes of a Gutter Rousseau

LES NUITS-DE PARIS by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. 375 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In the 18th century, Paris was the largest city on the Continent. It was also filthy, racked by poverty and raddled by crime. Through the dark jungle of Paris’ nights slipped a curious cloaked observer, Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. Part journalist, part novelist, part police spy, Restif was described by Havelock Ellis as “a gutter Rousseau.” and has become something of a literary cult figure in France today. In Les Nuits de Paris, here translated into English for the first time, Restif created a unique record of the lower depths in all their gamy variety on the eve and in the first years of the French Revolution.

Burglars, lovers, beggars, whores, pickpockets and girl pinchers moving through the crowds, a condemned murderer broken on the wheel, thieves stealing food with a pole through an open window, medical students digging up cadavers in deserted graveyards, little girls and boys sold into prostitution—Restif saw them all. And he set them down as he saw them, in odd, choppy verbal snapshots, some grotesque, a few funny, but all in appalling contrast to the occasional fine lady or powdered gentleman whose carriage splatters them with mud or casually kills someone.

Restif’s own sympathies were nonetheless with the aristocracy, and though he read rage in the eyes of the masses (“Statesmen, beware! A fateful revolution is approaching! The spirit of defiance is spreading!”), he thought it could be checked by the wisdom of Louis XVI—and by cutting laborers’ wages to remove the temptation to idleness. But his vignettes of violent street scenes and underworld characters develop into a seething panorama of the revolutionary mob, culminating inevitably in massacres in the streets and prisons, and finally in the Reign of Terror. As for Restif himself, he was several times in danger from the Terror, but made an abject declaration for the party of Robespierre and survived to become a minor police official under Napoleon.