Chevalier de Mailly - Life and Works

Life and Works

He appears to have become embroiled in a gay scandal in 1682, in which an aristocratic underground circle practicing le vice italien was uncovered. The supposed Confrérie italienne was even ascribed a constitution with a set of rules.

The chevalier de Mailly contributed a poem to the Mercure Galant December 1700, on the occasion of the departure for Spain of the duc d'Anjou as Philippe V. He declaimed his verses in the Café Procope, with the other wits of Paris.

Still, as a result of his scurrilous and anonymous secondary literary career, he could not fail to come to the attention of the lieutenant of police, Marc-Renée de Voyer d'Argenson, whose notes asserted that, far from being a godson of Louis XIV who had been wounded more than once in the armies of the King, he was actually the bastard of a maid in the hôtel de Mailly, brought up, out of charity by the marquise de Mailly. The wife of a bookseller, Auroy, who had advanced him 50 écus testified against him in 1702; it appeared to her that the manuscript, La Fille capitaine, instead of working up the personal memoirs of a well-known Parisian woman— recognizably the adventuress and singer Julie d'Aubigny— which Mme Auroy had entrusted to him;, produced a result instead that proved to be too scandalous to publish: it featured bedroom scenes and an escaping nun setting a fire to her convent. It appears that Mailly was required to quit Paris. A follow-up report of 15 September 1711 noted that he had returned to Paris and, being apprehended, spent a month in the Châtelet, following which he retired quietly to Rouen, where he seems to have remained, for his last work was printed there.

In the deductive reasoning shown by his princes of Serendip, taken up by Voltaire in Zadig, the chevalier de Mailly is sometimes credited as the originator of the clue-driven detective novel. The tale was retold in English by Horace Walpole, and the idea of serendipity passed into the English language.