Le gouté des Porcherons, ou Discours Comiques des Halles et des Ports. [Paris:]: “De l’imprimerie de Madame Angueule, Blanchisseuse de gros Linge, à la Grenouillère” [i.e., Cailleau], [1759/60?].
12mo (163 x 95 mm). 48 pages. A fine copy (a few letters faintly printed due to uneven presswork.) 20th-century retrospective hard-grain citron morocco, single gilt panel to covers, smooth spine in compartments with gold-tooled flowers and red onlaid petals, red morocco gilt lettering piece. Provenance: Jean Stern, bookplate, engraved by Agry. ***
A facétie by a popular writer and printer-publisher, reproducing the grammatically creative and colorfully insult-ridden argot of the Parisian working classes. In the first part, an anonymous and (presumably) young gentleman and his friends visit a neighborhood of ill repute: the Porcherons, a hamlet, at the time northeast of Paris (now the 9th arrondissement), filled with cabarets, pimps, prostitutes, thieves, bawdiness and brawls. The volleys of epithets exchanged by the participants in several typical incidents are recorded verbatim by the amused narrator in a series of casually linked anecdotes and rhyming litanies. A racy dialogue between a woman of casual morals and one of her many “suitors,” a fight between fishwives, and various jokes conclude the small volume. At the end is a publisher’s list of other “brochures” (pamphlets) of the same type, sold by Cailleau.
These stories and dialogues are a hook for the real subject of the little book: language. The slang referred to as poissard in French, from its original association with female fishmongers (known as poissardes, from poisson), a term extended to all the market-women of the Halles in Paris, was a subject of fascination to literary types, following in the steps of Joseph Vadé. Although light-hearted, such collections are precious for their preservation of 18th-century popular language.
This appears to be the second edition of the Gouté des Porcherons: another edition was published at around the same time, with the same imprint but largely different contents, following the initial “Goûter.”
In N. America I locate one institutional copy of this edition (Thomas Fisher Library) and one of the other edition (Newberry). Cf. Barbier II: 548; cf. C. Nisard, Étude sur le langage populaire ou patois de Paris et de sa banlieue (1872), pp. 413-14 (both citing the other edition). Item #4389
Price: $1,600.00