Note 420 — Chapter XII

There is a separate bibliography by Cubières-Palmézeaux (1875). The useful Dictionnaire des Littératures of Vapereau contains a list of between thirty and forty separate works of Restif's, divided into nearer two than one hundred volumes. He followed Prévost in Nouveaux Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité as he had followed Marivaux in the Paysan Perverti. He completed this work of his own with La Paysanne Pervertie; he wrote, besides the Pornographe, numerous books of social, general, and would-be philosophical reform—Le Mimographe, dealing with the stage; Les Gynographes, with a general plan for rearranging the status of women; L'Andrographe, a "whole duty of man" of a very novel kind; Le Thesmographe, etc.,—besides, close upon the end and after the autobiography above described, a Philosophie de M. Nicolas. His more or less directly narrative pieces, Le Pied de Fanchette, Lucile, Adèle, La Femme Infidèle, Ingénue Saxancour, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as La Vie de Mon Père, his most respectable book, is wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that the notice in Vapereau, while not bearing very hard on Restif on the whole, repeats the words cynisme and cynique in regard to him. Unless the term is in part limited and in part extended, so as to mean nothing but "exposure of things generally kept secret without apparent shame," it is entirely misplaced. Not merely outside of, but actually in his erotomania, Restif was a sentimental philanthropist of the all but most genuine kind, tainted indeed with the vanity and self-centredness which had reached their acme in Rousseau, but very much more certainly sincere, and of a temperament as different as possible from what is commonly called cynicism.