La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque Reading Order

La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque, 1892) by Anatole France is a philosophical novel set in eighteenth-century Paris, narrated by Jacques Ménétrier (known as Tournebroche, 'the turnspit'), the son of a rotisserie cook on the Île Saint-Louis, who becomes the pupil of the abbé Jérôme Coignard — a learned, licentious, generous, and thoroughly dishonest monk who is France's most fully realized creation. The novel belongs to the tradition of the philosophical conte (the eighteenth-century philosophical tale in the manner of Voltaire and Diderot) updated for the Third Republic: Coignard is simultaneously a brilliant philosopher and a moral scoundrel, and France uses his contradictions to mount an ironic defense of the pleasures of the mind and the body against the puritanisms of both revolutionary virtue and Christian asceticism. The novel is the first of two Coignard novels (the second, Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard, 1893, presents the abbé's philosophy directly as a series of dialogues) and the most narratively rich: the plot involves alchemy, erotic misadventure, the libertine nobility, and a murder, all treated with the lightness of touch and the moral complexity that are France's signature qualities.