Very Rare. OCLC records copies at the British Library (ex Henry Spencer Ashbee) only in the UK and - not seemingly recorded by OCLC - Harvard, Princeton and Yale in the USA. The first complete translation of Fanny Hill into French was not published until 1887. Rare Book Hub records a single copy of th present edition which appeared in a French auction ten years ago. The imprint “Lampsaque” is false and is an allusion to Lampsacus on the Hellespont where Priapus was venerated.
[Bound with]: FOUGERET DE MONTBRON (Louis-Louis). Margot la Ravaudeuse, par Mr. de M**. First Edition. 12mo. 160pp., title-page printed in red and black; lacking the engraved frontispiece. Some very minor spotting and light marking in places but otherwise fine. Hambourg [i.e. Paris?], [no publisher or printer given], 1800 [i.e. 1750?]. OCLC records a number of copies in European libraries but only the BL, Bodley and Manchester in the UK and Berkeley, Library of Congress, Illinois, Michigan and Rochester only in the USA.
The first French translation of Cleland’s scandalous novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (better known as “Fanny Hill”) published here with the name of the printer, publisher and translator concealed and with the false imprint “Lampsaque”. The publication of the novel in London lead to the arrest of the author and the book being withdrawn but this French translation shows how quickly the novel gained its notorious reputation across Europe and ensured that the work was still considered illicit in the 20th-century.
This particular copy is important as it is bound with a contemporary French erotic work - Margot la Ravaudeuse - by Jean-Louis Fougeret de Montbron who is now thought to be the translator of the present French edition of Fanny Hill and who was inspired by Cleland’s novel.
The first edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was published anonymously in London in two parts in November 1748 and February 1749. Cleland, along with the publishers Ralph and Fenton Griffiths and the printer Thomas Parker, were arrested in November 1749 on charges of publishing an obscene work. The book was officially withdrawn but since then has been reprinted hundreds of times and remains one of the most famous works of pornography ever written. It was still a notorious and illicit book in the 1960s.
This anonymous French translation (the book is in fact doubly anonymous as neither Fougeret de Montbron or Cleland’s name are mentioned on the title-page) and abridgement is thought to have been produced by Jean-Louis Fougeret de Montbron (1706-1760)
Cleland was persuaded by Ralph Griffiths to revise the novel so that it might pass the censors and so produced in 1750, the present Memoirs of Fanny Hill. An advertisement in the General Advertiser of 8 March 1750 announced: “This day is Publish’d, Compleat in One Pocket Volume, Price bound 3s. Memoirs of Fanny Hill [with the quotation from the text found on the title-page] Printed for R. Griffiths, at the Dunciad in St. Paul’s Church-yard…”. Foxon noted that an advertisement in The British Magazine for in March added: “Memoirs of Fanny Hill, (being the story of the heroine of a book published sometime since, entitled, Memoirs of a woman of pleasure, 2 vol.) divested of its obscenity…”
Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon has carefully examined the translation of Fanny Hill into French in her essay “The French Adventures of Fanny Hill” (in Launching Fanny Hill, ed. Fowler and Jackson (2004) p. 127) and notes that Cleland most likely was inspired by contemporary French erotic writing when he began Fanny Hill before discussing the present French translation describing it as a “somewhat drastically truncated version…being faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Cleland’s novel” (p.129). She continues: “Margot la ravaudeuse indeed bears a strong resemblance to the English text of Fanny Hill“ even suggesting that that, “the style of La Fille de joye appears as rather band compared to its original” because, “Fougeret de Montbron was saving his best writing for his own erotic masterpiece” and “jealously” retaining “the humour of Cleland’s novel for his own use in *Margot la ravaudeuse.”* (p.134-138).
Kleiman-Lafon continues:
“A confirmed libertine himself, Fourgeret de Montbron never intended to attenuate the sexual overtones of Cleland’s text. His version was indeed drastically shortened but it retained most, if not all of the episodes told by Fanny. He even translated the ‘minute details of things’ for which the narrator so often apologises. **Fougeret carefully transposed into French the simple and epicurean enjoyment with which the heroine seizes the day and welcomes any new encounter and experience in the art of love. He remains true to the original title and his French-speaking Fanny is truly a ‘woman of pleasure’”** (p.131).
By contrast, Kleiman-Lafon states that Margot, the eponymous character in Fourgeret de Montbron’s novel (bound here), far from being a woman of pleasure, “insists on the disgust and pain she feels at being reluctantly engaged in such a degrading activity as prostitution.” (p.138)
This translations of Fanny Hill is vitally important as it provides firm evidence for the early popularity of Cleland’s novel on the Continent. Added to this, we have the work bound with the translators own erotic novel which allows us to examine the editorial choices made by Fourgeret de Montbron in abridging the work (which Cleland himself had attempted in London) and how in a wider sense women are represented in English and French literature at the time. It would also be useful to examine the extent to which Fourgeret de Montbron adapted his translation of Fanny Hill to compete in the book market with his own novel and the extend to which he was using the notoriety of the novel to, “cash in on the success and fame of Fanny Hill in its original version as well as in his own translation.” (p.134)
