J.-M. Quérard's Les Supercheries littéraires dévoilées (2nd edn., 1889) contains seven large volumes listing all manner of literary frauds. In a sense all the innumerable memoir-novels, epistolary novels, and similar works of the 18th c. could be regarded as hoaxes, which attempt to pass off fiction as truth. Sometimes, as in the case of the Lettres portugaises (if these are indeed the work of Guilleragues), the trick was very effective, and one might speak of forgery. In the same way, while the use of pseudonyms for tactical or other purposes did not take in the readers of Candide (attributed to ‘le docteur Ralph’) or L' Ingénu (attributed to Quesnel), the claim that Holbach's Le Christianisme dévoilé was the work of Boulanger was plausible enough.

The hoax proper, however, implies the desire to mock readers and critics by fooling them into taking a forgery as genuine. There have been a number of famous cases where this succeeded—together with others where the jury is still out. Mérimée's Théâtre de Clara Gazul and La Guzla both took in competent judges (including Pushkin for the latter). In 1885 an improbably titled satirical spoof by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, Déliquescences, poémes décadents d'Adoré Floupette, was taken seriously by some readers, as was Pierre Louÿs's ‘translation’, Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894). La Chasse spirituelle (1949), published as a long-lost prose poem by Rimbaud, was in reality a pastiche by two actors, Madame Akakia-Viala (Marie-Antoinette Allévy) and Nicolas Bataille; apparently unintentionally, they hood-winked a number of connoisseurs. More recently, Romain Gary tricked the French literary public by winning the Prix Goncourt for a second time under the name of the mysterious Émile Ajar; arguably this was a case of pseudonymy rather than a hoax [see also Vian; Nuguet].

[Peter France]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.