Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron 31 min read

A man is magically transformed into a flame-colored sofa, condemned to witness the intimate secrets of everyone who sits upon him, a licentious Oriental fantasy.

Fougeret de Monbron's 1741 'The Flame-Colored Sofa' is a witty, risqué French conte in the fashionable Oriental-fairy-tale mode. Sly, satirical, of its libertine age. Read it for a naughty and clever eighteenth-century fantasy, where an enchanted piece of furniture sees far too much.

In its time

Published in 1741, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

31 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).