Nicolas-Edmee Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) took his inspiration from life: his rural youth in a village near Auxerre, his later knowledge of Paris, where he was a printer, and his lifelong experiences as a libertine. Much of Restif's work is libertine and was long excluded from serious studies of literature as cynical, vulgar, and tasteless. His depiction of the country, the city, women, though often idealized and nostalgic, contains a realism that comes only from intimate knowledge. He wrote about the lower classes and simple, uneducated peasants, whose habits and dialects he knew and capalred on paper. He dreamt of an egalitarian republic, wrote many tracts on social reform. During the revolution, between 1789 and 1793, Restif lives modestly in Paris, writing on, among other works,"Les Nuits de Paris" and "Les Dames Nationales"