Odd this day
Ah yes: the anniversary of Samuel Pepys reading a dirty book, and explaining to his diary that it’s all right, because it’s OK for him to read it, when it might not be for someone with a filthy mind.
The frontispiece of L’Ecole des Filles (known in English as The School of Venus) which you can find online is from a 1680 edition, so it might not be the version Pepys saw, but it gives you an idea of what’s inside.
It’s a sex manual in the form of conversations between innocent and experienced people — also known, in the language of the time, as ‘whore dialogues’. Here’s a relatively tame sample which made me laugh like an idiot:
The high-minded Pepys, of course,
did read through ‘L’escholle des filles,’ a lewd book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake.
Well, if you read the Victorian edition of his diaries, he did. If you read the version edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews and published in the slightly more permissive year of 1971…
it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger
…before going on to tell us:
after I had done it I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame, and so at night to supper and to bed.
So that’s all right, then.
