– to Margot’s mind, perhaps the worst crime of all. After years accumulating wealth and servicing buffoonish clients, Margot falls ill with a condition eventually diagnosed as ‘excessive luxury’ and, after taking an array of useless cures from quacks, is prescribed a simple life, rest, and a good diet. She recovers soon after adopting this life of moderation and retires, wealthy and independent, to a peaceful life in a genteel Parisian suburb. So goes the story of Fougeret de Monbron’s 1753 libertine novel, Margot la ravaudeuse (in English, Margot the stocking-mender).1 Loosely based on John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Margot tells the story of a young woman born into poverty who rises to the upper echelons of Parisian society by becoming a wealthy and philosophical libertine prostitute, revealing the hypocrisy and decadence of the ruling classes on the way. One of the better-known libertine novellas of the French eighteenthcentury, Margot sits alongside a number of ‘whore biography’ novels produced between the Renaissance and the Revolution,2 as well as within the wider genre of Enlightenment pornographic fiction written in the voices of women recounting their sexual awakening and erotic lives.3 Although united by their sexually explicit content, such novels varied substantially, both in their degree of philosophical engagement and in their depiction of women either as mindless objects of male desire or as cynical heroines exploiting the patriarchal society in which they lived. Margot la ravaudeuse offers one of the period’s more complex and politically engaged renderings of this coming-of-age tale, in which each stage of the heroine’s physical and intellectual development is marked not only by sexual exploits, but also by striking, if fleeting, images of literal or metaphorical consumption. Whether she is cutting her teeth in a chaotic brothel, or entertaining an oafish nobleman in lavish apartments, Margot’s life story is played out at the table as well as in the bedroom.
With Margot written during a period of revolutions in food and drink, marked by the development of nouvelle cuisine, significant advancements in digestive and culinary science, the democratization of luxury items such as coffee, and the advent of
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