Gil Blas was the most read French novel of the eighteenth century, a picaresque about a Spanish valet who rises through every kind of household and learns something dishonest in each. Lesage published it in parts between 1715 and 1735, and for the rest of the century printers all over France kept it in stock. This volume was printed at Toulouse in 1788 for Simon Sacareau, a bookseller on the rue Saint-Rome, which makes it a regional trade edition, the copy a reader in the south bought because it was there.
It is volume five of the set and holds Books IX and X, with the little copperplate scenes still in place. The binding is the good part: calf spattered green and red, a gilt spine, the number 5 in a small oval. Whoever bound the set put the wrong table of contents at the back of this one. We have left it where it was.
A year after this was printed the Bastille fell. The book does not know that yet.
