Louis de Boissy was, so Ioana Galleron’s ‘Introduction générale’ tells us, a relatively successful author for his day. A regular presence on three of the big stages of Paris (the Comédie-Française, the Comédie-Italienne, and the Foire), he was popular in the provinces, translated and performed abroad, and well enough known to figure regularly in the anecdotes of his contemporaries. And yet he has remained largely ignored by posterity, almost unpublished in modern editions, and dismissed as a scribbling ‘pauvre diable’, barely worthy of a place alongside his contemporaries Marivaux and Voltaire. With this, the first volume in a complete edition of his theatre, Galleron...