Blue Library
9851 Avventure di abate vestito da donna
François de Choisy. Introduction by Fausta Garavini
1974 / 142 PAGES.
Language: Italian
Some words become inevitably scandalous when placed next to one another: abbot and woman, for example. Unconcerned by such a scandal, this book tells the story of an abbot dressed as a woman, who marries a maiden dressed as a man in Louis XIV’s France.
The ambigu Abbé de Choisy inscribed his eccentric code of life among the inexhaustible and contradictory backdrops of the golden age, the era of Racine and Molière, of La Fontaine and Madame de Sévigné, behind the solemn and tedious scaffolding of official literature erected by Boileau. Perhaps raised by his mother to take on a woman’s soul along with her clothing, de Choisy could be found wearing skirts, earrings and velvet beauty spots well into old age. After spending half of his life in front of the mirror, the ambigu reflected narcissistically in the spring of his own memories, contemplating a self that became a character. As an even-handed administrator of unusual feelings and antiseptic, irreproachable chronicles, de Choisy miniaturised, in the dualism inherent in his biographical and literary behaviour, the radical contrasts, the unsuspected ferment, the unbridled fantasies that shook the age of divine reason.