A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of
romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view
of men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to
Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the 'vie intime' of the eighteenth
century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted
crowned heads, and to morrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime;
a book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence;
a record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales
of successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes,
of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the
delicate wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters,
and in the life of the past, who would not cry, "Where can such a book
as this be found?"