The Only Son

by Stéphane Audgeuy

Translated from the original French by John Cullen

Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions his older brother François only two times in his classic Confessions. In The Only Son, Stéphane Audeguy resurrects Rousseau's forgotten brother in a picaresque tale that brings to life the secret world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Instructed at an early age in the philosophy of libertinage by a decadent aristocrat and later apprenticed to a clock maker, François is ultimately disowned by his family and flees to Paris's underworld. There he finds work in a brothel that caters to politicians and clergy and begins his personal study of the varieties of sexual desire—to its most arcane proclivities. Audeguy uses the libertine's progress to explore the interplay between the individual and society, much in the tradition of Jean-Jacques, but with a very different emphasis. Bold, erotic, and historically fascinating, The Only Son is, in many ways, the anti-Confessions—François' own, decidedly different, portrait of human nature.

Stéphane Audeguy lives in Paris, where he teaches the history of cinema and arts. His first novel, The Theory of Clouds, has been translated into seventeen languages, and The Only Son won the 2007 Prix des Deux Magots.