RESTIF Nicolas Edme (1734-1806), called Restif de la Bretonne (the form Retif, though occasionally used by the author himself, and adopted by M. Monselet, has the less authority), was born at Sacy in the present department of the Yonne, France, on 23d October 1734. His father was a farmer of not the lowest rank, and the vanity of Restif has preserved or invented an extraordinary genealogy (supposed to date from his grandfather’s time) in which the family is traced to the Roman emperor Pertinax. This Restif did not take very seriously, but he is himself almost the only authority for the details of his own career, which he has voluminously recorded, and these details are in part so incredible, in part so obviously distorted by various motives, that it is very hard to do more than discover the general outline of his life. He was well educated—partly if not chiefly by his own devotion to books—he was apprenticed to a printer at Auxerre, and, having served his time, went to Paris. Here he worked as a journeyman printer for some time (indeed he continued his manual work for the greater part of his life), and in 1760 he married Anne or Agnes Lebègue, a relation of his former master at Auxerre. He soon tired of her, and has left the most unfavourable pictures of her morals and temper. In the early years of their married life they were but little together, and for the last twenty they never saw each other; but Restif’s own account is sufficient to show that certainly not all, and probably very few, of the faults were on the wife’s side. It was not till five or six years after his marriage that Restif, who by his own account had written voluminously from his earliest youth but had published nothing, appeared as an author, and from that time to his death on February 2, ...