A satirical account of fashionable life in late pre-Revolutionary France. Chapter XVI, titled "Avis aux Hessois & autres peuples de l'Allemagne, venus par leurs princes à L'Angleterre", written by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, and published originally as a pamphlet in 1777, is a call to Hessian mercenaries to join with the Americans in the overthrow of tyranny. Chapter XVII, titled "Lettre du Comte de Chanmburg, écrite de Rome au baron de Hohendorff, commandant des tropes Hessoises en Amérique," is attributed to Benjamin Franklin and appears here in book form for the first time (William B. Willcox and Douglas M. Arnold, eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Vol. 23, 1983, p. 480). Other chapters are about bull fighting, economics, etc. French text.