Fougeret de Monbron (1706-1760) was a minor French writer known in Parisian literary circles in the 1740s and 1750s for his spoof of Voltaire's Henriade, entitled
La Henriade travestie (1745). He is generally considered the model for 'LUI' in Diderot's fragmented novel the Neveu de Rameau, written some time after 1761.
In addition to this, his travel memoirs, Le Cosmopolite (1750), are a recognized source of Voltaire's Candide (1759). Today, Monbron's novel on prostitution Margot la ravaudeuse (1753) (or Margot, the stocking darner) is his best known work. Widely read in France (where it has appeared in four separate editions since 1990), and moreover translated since the eighteenth century into other European languages, Margot has never been adequately made available to English-speaking readers. Professor Langille's new translation brings Margot la ravaudeuse for the first time to students of eighteenth-century literature, and most especially to those interested in that intriguing sub-genre known as 'prostitution narrative'.
