his most famous novel remains "l'aventurier françois" ("the french adventurer", 1782), which quérard calls a "cluster of incoherent follies", adding that in his opinion it "delighted frivolous readers" until the issue of the third set of books in the series, at which point the public lost interest. it narrated the adventures and extraordinary travels of grégoire merveil, including his discovery of a subterranean people of old criminals. accused of murder, he had to make his own inquiries to discover and confound the real murderer. "le crime" (1789) tells of the imprisonment of the young man césar de perlencour who is released from jail and falls into the hands of a curious secret society, the "société souterraine" or underground society. that character returned and was found innocent in his next novel, "le repentir" (1789).