Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in
Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a
highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands,
cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over
sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years
later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed
through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings
and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices.
Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic,
picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-
stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One
Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.