Louis Dupré d’Aulnay (c.1670–1758) had passed his eightieth year by the time he produced his only known work of fiction. A career military administrator who served as a war commissioner before rising to director-general of military provisions for the French armies, he had previously published only Réflexions sur la transfusion du sang (Reflections on the Transfusion of Blood, 1749) and is doubtfully credited with some Lettres sur la génération des animaux  (Letters on the Generation of Animals). That an army quartermaster, a man whose professional life had been given over to the provisioning of regiments, should turn at the close of it to a slim novel of cross-dressing and amorous masquerade is one of the small surprises of mid-century French literature.

Les aventures du faux Chevalier de Warwick (The Adventures of the False Chevalier of Warwick) first appeared in 1750, anonymously, in two volumes, under the imprint ‘London, at Vaillant’s’, but the work was in fact printed in France. A reissue followed in 1752, again with English window-dressing, and the novel then sank without trace. It was rescued from obscurity by Paul Lacroix, who in 1880 issued a small-format reprint in his series Les Chefs-d'Œuvre Inconnus (The Unknown Masterpieces).

The narrative is told in the first person by a young French gentleman who, while travelling, falls in with the charming Chevalier of Warwick, only to discover that his new companion is in fact Mademoiselle de Bouqueville, a young Frenchwoman who, for reasons which gradually become apparent, is travelling in male disguise. The book proceeds through a sequence of episodes including bedroom scenes, pursuits between London, Dover and Brussels, intrigues over letters of credit and various sums of money, and an interlude conducted under Turkish names – Huldarick, Mahamouth, Mustapha. The cross-dressed heroine, the constancy of the narrator, and a narrative hovering between sentimental novel and gallant tale, give the book its peculiar charm – the eroticism is implied rather than exhibited, usually conducted at the threshold of the bedchamber rather than within it.

Beyond the novelty of an octogenarian quartermaster’s late venture into gallant fiction, the book has lived chiefly through later editions. After Lacroix, the next and most distinguished revival came when the Paris publisher La Tradition issued Les aventures singulières du faux Chevalier de Warwick (The Singular Adventures of the False Chevalier of Warwick), presented by Jacques Perret and accompanied by sixteen original compositions by André Collot. It is in Collot’s hands that Dupré d’Aulnay's chevalier in petticoats finally receives the sustained pictorial response the text invites, turning a lost gallant novel into one of the more elegant illustrated erotic books of the mid-twentieth century.

Collot’s illustrations are executed in his characteristic soft lithographic crayon, lightly tinted with watercolour washes in dove greys, sage greens, dusty pinks and old golds, and occasional accents of vermilion and turquoise. The drawing is loose, almost smudged, with the figures often left half-defined against shadowy curtained interiors. Faces are stylised into a repertoire of long-nosed profiles and heavy-lidded gazes, and the costume detail – embroidered waistcoats, ruffled chemises – is suggested rather than defined. The sequence carries the reader through the arc of the narrative – a barred window with startled birds, a cloaked figure confronted by a tricorned watch in a nocturnal street, the candlelit tête-à-tête at which Mademoiselle de Bouqueville’s identity is revealed. Then there is a long succession of bedroom scenes – two women entwined in their nightclothes, naked bodies emerging from sheets, embraces among the bed-curtains, a mishap with a broken bed, feet flailing among rumpled linen. Collot’s treatment is wholly in the spirit of the text; the eroticism is tender, the cross-dressing episodes are handled through ambiguity of pose and silhouette rather than caricature, and the whole portfolio has a faded, eighteenth-century atmosphere.

Les aventures singulières du faux Chevalier de Warwick was published by La Tradition, Paris, in a limited numbered edition of 530 copies.