Loves of Times Gone By summary

The 10 key ideas

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   A dandy writes a love letter to himself

   The Chevalier de Pimprenelle wakes at two in the afternoon after losing at cards. His friends call him a dandy, and he has no idea what the word means. His footman, La Brie, fetches a small book with a verse definition. It speaks of a small man who reads brief romantic notes he sends to himself.

   The chevalier is delighted. He sits La Brie at a table and dictates a love letter, with an absent husband, a blot for passion and a flourish. La Brie signs it with an invented woman's name, and the two men laugh at their own cleverness.

   That night the chevalier takes Abbé Goguet to the Opera, then joins the party at his little house, where a table rises through the floor. A dancer snatches the note and reads the signature aloud. The guest of honor, a red-faced financier named Mondor, cries out that this is his wife.

   A joke made for vanity can land on the wrong doorstep.

2. 2

   A calm wife faces a furious husband

   The ride to the house of Madame d'Obligny is silent.

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3. 3

   An old man mourns the games of his youth

   In The Parlor Games, the elderly Chevalier de Pinparé writes to his young niece Antoinette.

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4. 4

   A financier's secret book caused a scandal

   This essay turns to Monsieur de la Popelinière, a rich tax farmer who loved wit and style.

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5. 5

   A library of forgotten novels, judged frankly

   The Amorous Library is a catalog for the general reader.

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6. 6

   A poet gives antique gods a modern boudoir

   The Four Metamorphoses is a small book of sixty-eight pages, published anonymously in 1799.

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7. 7

   A charming libertine lived by song and stage

   Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Choudard-Desforges was born into a porcelain shop on the Rue du Roule.

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8. 8

   An old royalist and his daughter face arrest

   In 1792 old Fragonard, the painter of smiles, sits in a gloomy apartment.

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9. 9

   A daughter's plea and a trial that ends in sentence

   Monselet writes of the September massacres of 1792 with open horror.

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10. 10

    Thieves empty the royal treasury in one night

    Just after the September massacres, two small-time prisoners, Douligny and Chambon, hear a man in a café complain that the Garde-Meuble, where the crown jewels are kept, has a careless curator and a drunken guard.

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