Charles Monselet

In the Paris of 1843, the young and ambitious Philippe Beyle falls in love with the beautiful singer Marianna, conquers her heart and then, having satisfied his vanity, abandons her.

Humiliated, the singer uses her power within a female Freemasonry, a kind of parallel police headed by and for women, to launch the all-powerful secret society in the footsteps of her lover in order to satisfy his revenge.

Of this libertine poem, they only quote the first quatrain3, very correct, which does not suggest the rest: The little laundresses That we see, every Monday, To lazy practices Wear the laundry at noon, He is one of the authors of the pastiche, Le Parnassiculet contemporain4, and was a friend of Jean-Gabriel Capot de Feuillide, to whom he devoted a favorable review in La Lorgnette littéraire.

Eugène Chavette, wanting to prove that Monselet was not a gourmet, invited him one day in the company of Aurélien Scholl to the restaurant Brébant, and made him serve a meal where the dishes did not correspond to the printed menu: Les nests d 'swallows were in fact simple noodles with mashed flageolet beans, cod bream cooked on a comb, heather cock, a small turkey with absinthe, Château-Larose, Mâcon with a few drops of Grassot punch, etc.

The same year, he commits the Forgotten and the Dédaignés, picturesque rehabilitation of little-known authors of the eighteenth century, and, by comparison, points to the eclecticism of the stylistic schools of the middle of the Second Empire.