Laid in a period when sexual pleasure was regarded by the “enlightened” as an inborn human right as inalienable as liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Hic et Hic is a delightful example of what the eighteenth century called “libertinage.” Owing his birth to a laundress and “a distraction of a Jesuit priest from Avignon,” Hic et Hic — its uninhibited and inventive abbot-hero — proves to be a precocious little libertine, for at fourteen he is initiated into the ways of sexual gratification by the regent of his seminary, where he finds more pleasure than pain in playing Alcibiades to the rector’s Socrates.
Introduced by the rector into the aristocratic household of the Count and Countess of Valbouillant as a tutor for their son, Hic et Hec teaches both his new master and his new mistress the joys of flagellation to which the rector has introduced him, and explores with the two of them the pleasures of the “double road to happiness.” This ménage à trois soon becomes a ménage à quatre as Babet, the Countess’s maid and ward, joins in their pleasures, proving to the Countess’s delight to be a talented devotee of both Eros and Sappho, and displaying, in the abbot’s words,
