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The best-selling books from the underground literature of the Ancien Regime included a heavy proportion of “libelles” and “chroniques scandaleuses” – that is, popular works that linked public affairs with the private lives of the most eminent figures in the kingdom, beginning with the king himself. Where did this literature come from, how was it written, and how did it resonate in the public before the French Revolution ? Those questions lead deep into territory located along the fault lines of society, the ambiguous areas between the “dominants” and the “domines”, according to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. One way to cope with those questions and to make them manageable at an empirical level of research is to study an extraordinary case from the archives of the Paris police. It concerns a chambermaid who wrote an allegorical novel about the sex life of Louis xv. In attempting to get to the bottom of the case, the police turned up some remarkable information about how oral media and print culture intersected. Their investigation opens up some broad issues related to the history of reading and the formation of public opinion – themes that have implications for the understanding of other eras in other places and even for some of the theoretical issues raised by sociologists.