numerous editions in old French, some expurgated, and all difficult of understanding where the average English reader is concerned. As we note in the preface to Garnier's latest issue, the work, for the greater part, "is an enigma to modern readers and contains a crowd of obscurities.... it would need volume after volume to explain and comment upon everything that calls for explanation and comment."
The Way to Attain or The Right Way with Women (the title of de Verville's book has suffered various translations) would seem to have a dual personality; one: a clear-cut collection of stories, witty, realistic, free, Rabelaisian, or obscene as you choose to term them; another: the same stories, enmeshed in a mass of innuendo, obscure sayings, licentious and scatalogical asides, and—sometimes—almost meaningless phraseology. The trouble is to separte the grain from the chaff, the stories from the irrelevant verbiage—not that the latter is not often highly entertaining. Bernard de la Monnoye, in his Dissertation (cit. sup.), bears out our criticism when explaining the plan of the book. "The author supposes a sort of general banquet," he writes, "where, without regard for rank or degree, he introduces persons of every kind and age, scallawags for the most part, who, with no object but their, own amusements, talk with the utmost freedom, and passing almost imperceptibly from subject to subject, cause the stories to be lost to sight. In fact, they are so jumbled up in the book that one is hard put to find them...."
and perfect as when printed over thirty yars ago, realising £4-15s. We believe that a few extra copies on large paper still exist, but the booksellers ask a prohibitive price for them.
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