On the morning of Sunday 9 February 1668, Samuel Pepys appears to have been in two places at once: “Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office, doing business and also reading a little of L'escolle des Filles.” His entanglement with this quintessential libertine text – “a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world” – had begun four weeks before in a more public setting, a respectable bookshop in the Strand. He discovered it to be “the most bawdy, lewd book that I ever saw, rather worse than putana errante – that I was ashamed of reading it.” Nevertheless, on 8 February he returned to “that idle, roguish book, L'escolle des Filles; which I have bought in plain binding (avoiding the buying of it better bound),” and on the following Lord's Day he took his pleasure of it in full, starting in the morning while simultaneously doing “business” in the office, and finishing it in his chamber that night. “After I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame.”

Understandably, this Escole des Filles passage has become a sacred text of the “History of Private Life”; though this paper will argue that the construction of sexuality, under a priapic monarch, breaks down the dichotomy of private and public, we should begin by recognizing the layers of secrecy that screen the episode from view.