Would-Be Commoner（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　In the tradition of “The Return of Martin Guerre”, a dramatic
tale of false identity, murder, and bigamy that riveted France
during the reign of Louis XIV. From MIT historian Jeffrey Ravel
comes a scandalous tale of imposture that sheds new light on French
politics and culture in the pivotal but underexamined period
leading up to the Enlightenment. In the waning days of the
seventeenth century, a French nobleman named Louis de la Pivardière
returned from the Nine Years War and, for mysterious reasons, gave
up his aristocratic life to marry the daughter of an innkeeper in a
remote village. But several years later, struggling financially, he
returned to his first wife in search of money. She turned him away,
and he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. This led to a
murder investigation and the arrest of Pivardière’s first wife and
her alleged lover, a local prior. Stranger yet, Pivardière finally
did come out of hiding but was believed by many to be an impostor
conjured up in order to clear the wife of murder charges. The case
became a cause célèbre across France, obsessing everyone from the
peasantry to the courts, from the Comédie-Fran?aise to Louis XIV
himself. It was finally left to a brilliant young jurist,
d’Aguesseau, to separate fact from fiction, and set France on a
path to a new and enlightened view of justice. Masterfully
researched and vividly recounted, “The Would-Be Commoner” charts
the monumental shift from passion to reason in the twilight years
of the Sun King.

　　Jeffrey S. Ravel is an associate professor of history at MIT
and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the American Historical Association, among
others. He is a former editor of “Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture”.