Occasion – Persian Letters, Charles-Louis Montesquieu

A great Persian nobleman, curious about Western customs, stayed for a long time in Paris towards the end of Louis XIV's reign and during the years of the Regency. As if emerging from a long winter, an entire nation then awakens to criticism, and under the astonished gaze of its host, its institutions and customs, its traditions and beliefs will reveal their foundations as well as their follies – for isn't a country whose sovereign can choose "an eighteen-year-old minister and an eighty-year-old mistress, where the henchmen of a magic pope run rampant with impunity," to the highest degree, the kingdom of anti-nature? Through the voice of his Persian, Montesquieu sharply criticizes a society that is brilliantly decaying. But rest assured: gravity, here, is not appropriate. "There were then a quantity of men, lively and sensual, whose intelligence stirred Europe and tormented enormously all things, divine and otherwise; people had manners, even in the street. Merchants knew how to form a sentence, down to the contractors, the girls, the spies, and the flies who expressed themselves like no one today. The taxman demanded with grace," Paul Valéry assures us. If this art of living and speaking has been lost, Montesquieu's genius fortunately preserves for us its unalterable testimony in this epistolary novel which, by its teeming diversity, is undoubtedly the masterpiece of the baroque renaissance.