In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the comic opera houses of Paris often staged plays like this: a shepherd defeated a burgher or nobleman in love; a prince fell for a shepherdess and, to marry her, devised a scheme to break up a pair of rural lovers, sending one of his ladies to seduce the honest young farmhand. Yet the dull-witted farmer had no idea how to flirt, and no matter how coquettishly the lady posed, he showed no reaction at all.
City folk found this sort of pastoral love novel and amusing, but how did country folk react?
In Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, dreams were often what one could not attain in reality and what one most needed to compensate for. In reality, there were few cases of shepherds defeating noble lords in love. Staging it in a comedy was equivalent to putting their dreams on display. So were farmers visiting the city and lower-class burghers the ones who enjoyed such plays most?
No, no, no. Those who loved this pastoral romance most were Paris's minor nobles. If a shepherdess like those in the plays truly existed, they would marry her and bring her back to Paris, showing her off to their friends as proof of what true simplicity, innocence, kindness, chastity, and so on looked like—virtues that had already dried up in the city. Whenever Pastoral Love was performed in Paris, the minor nobles were utterly bewitched by the shepherdesses' natural beauty, bright as a sunny spring day. The notion that true happiness and true marriage could only be found in the countryside spread far and wide, and when they saw the plain, happy smiles on the faces of farming couples, their own faces turned green with envy.
Perhaps it was because of corsets, or perhaps