Marcel Proust was not the first French author to devote his sleepless nights to collecting compromising snippets of gossip from concierges, doormen and barmen, and assorted flunkies at the Jockey Club, as well as from wellplaced friends, all over the Paris of his day. Some 2 1/2 centuries before, the obscure but fulsomely named Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux had put the final lurid touches on his massive assemblage of “little histories” (or “Historiettes” in French), in which he dished the dirt on everyone from Henri IV and Louis XIII to Cardinal Richelieu and other princes of the church, not forgetting sleazy aristocrats, cowardly generals, fops surviving by their wits, and a well-rouged assemblage of such courtesans as the irrepressible Ninon de l’Enclos. Tallemant was a paparazzo of the quill pen.The portraits he drew often have the rimlit starkness of a Weegee photograph; all the bodies still lie sprawled where they fell.

Tallemant seems to have composed his chatty masterpiece for his own amusement and that of his friends; he completed it in 1659 but never sought to publish it, though he lived for another 33 years. When a partial edition appeared in 1834, it caused huge consternation and Tallemant was denounced as a scoundrel. How could he say such scurrilous things about iconic figures like Henry (“Paris is worth a mass”) IV? His disclosures about Louis XIII’s cruelty, miserliness, and incompetence were even more shocking. The little details rankled the most.Quoi? Cardinal Richelieu, the supreme architect of French absolutism, suffered so badly from hemorrhoids that he had to have his house remodeled to allow him to be carried painlessly in? The Marechal de Bassompierre died after overindulging in a “bean-feast?” Zut alors! Catastrophe!

What made Tallemant’s disclosures even more unsettling was that he seemed to have no particular political ax to grind. In his preface he declares, “I propose to say both good and ill without hiding the truth.” This turns out to be correct. He is as generous in his por trayal of the witty and virtuous Madame de Rambouillet as he is unforgiving in his acid delineation of Cardinal de Retz. (He knew them both intimately; he frequented the sparkling salon of Madame, whom he adored, and he was a traveling companion of the cardinal,whom he despised.) And as it happens, recent scholarship in archives and historical records has confirmed virtually all of Tallemant’s anecdotes; he was a gossip but a scrupulous one.

The best French edition of the “Historiettes” in the sumptuous “Pleiade” edition runs to two plump volumes of more than 2,000 pages. A piquant English sampling of the “Little Histories” is available in “Portraits and Anecdotes (Historiettes),” translated by Hamish Miles (Oxford University Press, 191 pages, out of print but available for less than $10 at Abebooks). Mr. Miles captures Tallemant’s peculiar style with its robust colloquialisms, abrupt swerves of emphasis, and gloating accents; as we read, we seem to hear him whispering his scabrous disclosures to the accompaniment of confidential chuckles.

Nothing is more satisfying than to be a hidden witness to the inanities of the high and mighty.Tallemant tells us that Louis XIII indulged in the oddest of hobbies, such as larding loins of veal like some bungling sous-chef (Tallemant, rather haughtily, sniffs, “Notice how admirably the words accord, ‘majesty’ and ‘larding!'”) or constructing windowframes. He also had a passion for playing the barber, leaving many of his officers with scraggly tufts instead of manly beards,much to their disgruntlement. Far worse than these eccentricities, however, were his cheapness, his laziness, and his cruelty, all of which his secret observer records. Louis, he tells us, liked to mock the grimaces of the dying and once made a show of mimicking the agonies of Huguenot prisoners whom he had left to die of thirst. In a few sentences Tallemant tells us all we need to know about supreme power and the lack of imagination it entails.

Tallemant took an almost voluptuous pleasure in anecdote, and some of his best histories record the quirks of otherwise forgotten individuals. One of my favorites is Mademoiselle de Gournay, who claimed to be the adopted daughter of Montaigne.”She was learned and wrote verse,” Tallemant tells us, “but it was wretched stuff.” One of her productions was titled “The Shadow” and included a chapter consisting of nothing but absurd diminutives such as “pot, potkin, potkinlet,” and the like; we can almost hear the Surrealists and Oulipo panting in the wings. Mlle. de Gournay was prone to malapropism or worse and was much mocked for writing “tit” when she meant “Titus.” Other poets foisted unseemly words on her, such as “foutaison” (“f-ery”), which the ingenuous lady then felt compelled to defend, though she conceded that it was “rather improper.”

Tallemant had a good nose for folly. Though he was a chronicler of malice, he wasn’t himself malicious. He seems to have taken inordinate pleasure in the spectacle of human life, the bad as well as the good. In this he partakes of the spirit of his great contemporaries, but without their bitterness or their grandiosity. He prepared his huge compilation as a book, complete with preface and in careful order; he preserved the manuscript carefully and even left instructions about it on his deathbed. And yet, he never tried to publish it. In an age steeped in notions of “la gloire,” Tallemant seems to have been indifferent to renown. He loved jokes and pranks and pratfalls, the startled disclosure and the unintended acknowledgement; but most of all he loved gossip, and from that least enduring form of human expression he cobbled together a book that has lasted. Maybe in his long final years he suspected as much and found it glory enough.

eormsby@nysun.com