Évangile de Nicodème

fiction, the histoire comique on which it depended, lost its point, and Le Roman bourgeois (1666) by Antoine Furetière (1619–88) went largely unremarked. Set in the Place Maubert in the lower reaches of the legal profession, it tells of the love of Nicodème for pretty Javotte. These ‘anti-novelists’ (to use Sorel’s term) were aware that their descriptions of low life were of little interest to a polite readership but they remained in touch with mainstream tastes not only through their pastiches of recognizable