Le Sopha, conte moral

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Le Sopha, conte moral is a 1742 novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.

The story concerns a young courtier whose soul in a previous life was condemned to travel from sofa to sofa as a sofa in search of true love and not to be reincarnated in a human body until a man and a woman sincerely in love with each other had consummated their passion on "his" sofa.

Many of the characters in the novel are satirical portraits of influential and powerful Parisians of Crébillon’s time. For this reason the book was published anonymously and with a false imprint. Nevertheless, Crébillon was discovered to be the author and, as a consequence, he was exiled to a distance of fifty leagues from Paris.

Le Sopha was translated into English by Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett in 1742.