The publisher of
Bibliothek for det smukke Kiøn, Søren Gyldendal, issued a translation of d’Arnaud’s stories in 1780. He advertised them to be more virtuous than ‘the other so-called
Contes Moraux’.
1 LE, 29 September 1780, p. 624: ‘At enhver Fortælling sigter til at befordre Dyd i den egentligste Forstand, er et Fortrin, som overgaaer alle de andre, og mere end de andre saa kaldte Contes moraux kan rose sig af.’ Gyldendal echoes a much-repeated criticism of the
Contes from their first publication under this title in France. A Danish critic (1776) summed up the sentiment in his characterization of ‘Soliman II’: ‘This story is, like most marmontelian ones, rich in invention and well-formed characters, but does otherwise not serve to improve morals’.
2 NKJ no. 27 (1776), p. 210: ‘Denne Fortælning er, som de fleste marmontelske, rig paa Opfindelse og vel udførte Caracterer; men skal for Resten ikke tiene til at forbedre Sæderne.’ According to Astbury, this criticism dominated in the German states, where new
moralische Erzählungen were given a more pronounced moral of virtuous individuals, rather than in the sense of
mœurs or social norms. While this ‘German’ tendency in the Dano-Norwegian reception is reflected in the preference for translating the later and most ‘moral’ stories of the collection, the distribution of the French volume editions points to a parallel set of literary ‘morals’ for privileged readers of foreign languages. Regardless of language, however, many readers of these stories took part in a transnational practice of both reading to be entertained and reading to become a better citizen – in love, marriage, society and, not least, in the republic of fiction. While the ways these texts reach these readers sometimes remained morally contested themselves, the agents in the closely-knit European book market ensured that readers from Paris to Bergen could take part in literary sensations, adapt them locally, and sometimes send some new fruits in return. The story of Philibert’s work is a reminder of the importance of re-evaluating the binary centre–periphery view of the European book market and consider a larger network of entangled literary citizens.