Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics)

by Denis Diderot

  1746

  Beginning of a liaison with Mme de Puisieux which lasts until 1751. Invited by the publisher Le Breton to translate Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728). Meets d’Alembert. June: publishes Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques) anonymously; it is banned in July. Birth of François-Jacques-Denis. Ordination of Didier-Pierre Diderot.

  1747

  June: denounced by the curé of Saint-Médard as ‘a most dangerous man’, he is watched by the police. 16 October: becomes joint director, with D’Alembert, of the Encyclopaedia (Encyclopédie).

  1748

  Publication of his first novel, The Indiscreet Jewels (Les Bijoux indiscrets). His sister Angélique dies in her convent. October: death of his mother.

  1749

  24 July–3 November: imprisoned at the Château de Vincennes for publishing the Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles). There he is visited by Rousseau. On his release, he meets d’Holbach and Grimm.

  1750

  June: death of François-Jacques-Denis. October: birth of Denis-Laurent, who dies in December. Distribution of the Prospectus of the Encyclopaedia.

  1751

  18 February: Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (Lettre sur les sourds et muets). 1 July: publication of volume i of the Encyclopaedia.

  1752

  January: volume ii of the Encyclopaedia which, together with volume i, is banned by the Royal Council. The Prades affair brings Diderot into conflict with the authorities. Police raid his house. He entrusts other manuscripts to Malesherbes, the government minister in charge of the book trade, for safekeeping.

  1753

  November: volume iii of the Encyclopaedia. 2 September: birth of Marie-Angélique, his fourth and only surviving child. December: Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature). Not wishing to provoke the authorities, he publishes no more radical works until 1778.

  1754

  Volume iv of the Encyclopaedia. Begins following a course of chemistry lectures.

  1755

  Volume v of the Encyclopaedia. Moves to the rue Taranne, where he lives until shortly before his death. First of many contributions appear in Grimm’s Literary Correspondence (Correspondance littéraire). July: meets Sophie Volland (1716–84), who may have been his mistress for a time, and with whom he corresponded regularly for many years.

  1756

  May: volume vi of the Encyclopaedia. 29 June: Diderot’s letter to Landois on determinism.

  1757

  February: publication of the play The Natural Son (Le Fils naturel) and the Conversations about ‘The Natural Son’ (Entretiens sur le Fils naturel), a discussion of the play and of Diderot’s views on drama. March: beginning of the quarrel with Rousseau. November: volume vii of the Encyclopaedia.

  1758

  D’Alembert states his intention of withdrawing from the Encyclopaedia. October: Diderot breaks with Rousseau. November: the play The Father of the Family (Le Père de famille) and the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry (Discours sur la poésie dramatique).

  1759

  March: the permission to print the Encyclopaedia is withdrawn. 3 June: death of his father. September: the Encyclopaedia is condemned by Rome. Writes the first of his nine Salons (detailed accounts of the major art exhibitions in Paris, the last completed in 1781) for the Literary Correspondence.

  1760

  February–May: correspondence with the Marquis de Croismare, which becomes the starting point for The Nun (La Religieuse). 2 May: first performance of Palissot’s satirical play Les Philosophes, which attacks him and the other leading philosophes.

  1761

  February: The Father of the Family is performed in Paris. Writes the Eulogy of Richardson (Éloge de Richardson), published in 1762. April (?): meets Jean-François Rameau, nephew of the composer. September: revises the last volumes of the Encyclopaedia.

  1762

  6 August: the Parlement orders the expulsion of the Jesuits. Works on Rameau’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau). D’Holbach introduces him to Laurence Sterne, who promises to send him the first six volumes of Tristram Shandy. The first of the eleven volumes of plates which accompany the Encyclopaedia appears: the last is published in 1772.

  1763

  Quarrels with his brother who, since 1745, had considered him the Antichrist. Meets David Hume.

  1764

  October: meets David Garrick. November: is furious to learn that his publisher Le Breton has secretly censored articles of the Encyclopaedia.

  1765

  Reconciled with D’Alembert, but Rousseau rejects his overtures. 1 May: Louis XV grants him permission to sell his library to Catherine II of Russia for 15,000 livres and an annual pension of 1,000 livres. She allows him to use it during his lifetime: it will revert to her only on his death. Autumn: reads volume viii of Tristram Shandy which contains the story of Trim’s knee. Resumes, or more probably begins writing Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques le fataliste).

  1766

  Subscribers receive the remaining volumes (viii–xvii) of the Encyclopaedia.

  1767

  Diderot’s brother appointed canon of the cathedral at Langres.

  1769

  August–September: writes D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de D’Alembert). Falls in love with Mme de Maux.

  1770

  Writes a number of tales and dialogues, including The Two Friends from Bourbonne (Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne).

  1771

  Writes the Philosophical Principles Concerning Matter and Movement (Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement) and reads a version of Jacques the Fatalist to a friend. 26 September: The Natural Son staged in Paris. Diderot withdraws it after one performance.

  1772

  March: On Women (Sur les femmes). September: finishes two stories, This is Not a Story (Ceci n’est pas un conte) and Madame de la Carlière. Marriage of Angélique to an ironmaster, Caroillon de Vandeul.

  1773

  11 June: leaves Paris for Russia. 15 June–20 August: stays at The Hague, where he revises Rameau’s Nephew, Jacques the Fatalist, and an article which would be published as The Paradox of the Actor (Le Paradoxe sur le comédien). Writes the First Satire. 8 October: arrives at St Petersburg.

  1774

  In Russia, he works on various writings dealing with politics, physiology, and materialism. 5 March: leaves St Petersburg, reaching The Hague on 5 April, where he remains until 15 September. Arrives in Paris on 21 October.

  1776

  A dialogue on atheism, the Conversation of a Philosopher with the Maréchale de *** (Entretien d’un philosophe avec la Maréchale de ***), appears in Métra’s Secret Correspondence (Correspondance secrète).

  1777

  Continues his collaboration (1772–80) with the abbé Raynal in the History of the Two Indies (Histoire des deux Indes), writes a comedy, Is he Good, is he Wicked? (Est il bon, est il méchant?), and further revises Rameau’s Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist.

  1778

  October: publication of the First Satire in the Literary Correspondence. November–June 1780: publication in serial form of Jacques the Fatalist in the Literary Correspondence.

  1780

  Revises The Nun, also serialized in the Literary Correspondence, and expands his Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero (Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, 1778), his major political work.

  1781

  July: reads Jacques the Fatalist to his wife and probably makes further additions to the text.

  1783

  29 October: death of D’Alembert.

  1784

  22 February: death of Sophie Volland. The news is kept from Diderot, who is recovering from an attack of apoplexy. 15 July: moves to the rue de Richelieu. 31 July: death of Diderot. He is buried (1 August) in the church of Saint-Roch. 9 September: Catherine II sends 1,000 roubles to Mme Diderot.

  1785

  Friedrich Schiller translates the Mme de la Pommeraye episode of Jacques the Fatalis
t in Die Rheinische Thalia. This text is translated back into French by J.-P. Doray de Langrais in 1792 as Strange Case of a Woman’s Vengeance (Exemple singulier de la vengeance d’une femme). 5 November: Diderot’s library and manuscripts arrive in St Petersburg.

  1792

  Jacques the Fatalist translated into German by Christlob Mylius.

  1796

  Publication of The Nun and Jacques the Fatalist.

  1805

  Goethe publishes his translation of Rameau’s Nephew.

  Jean-Philippe Rameau walking in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.

  C. L. Carmontelle, etching

  (Jean-Philippe sometimes signed as Jean-Baptiste;

  the year of birth given is incorrect.)

  RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

  Second Satire

  Vertumnis quotquot sunt natus iniquis*

  (HORACE, Satires, II. vii)

  RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

  RAIN or shine, it’s my habit, about five of an evening, to go for a stroll in the Palais-Royal.* It’s me you see there, invariably alone, sitting on the d’Argenson bench, musing. I converse with myself about politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I give my mind licence to wander wherever it fancies. I leave it completely free to pursue the first wise or foolish idea that it encounters, just as, on the Allée de Foy, you see our young rakes pursuing a flighty, smiling, sharp-eyed, snub-nosed little tart, abandoning this one to follow that one, trying them all but not settling on any. In my case, my thoughts are my little flirts. If the weather’s too cold, or too wet, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence,* where I pass the time watching the games of chess. Of all the cities in the world, it’s Paris, and of all the places in Paris, it’s the Café de la Régence, where chess is played best. Rey’s café is the arena where the astute Legal, the subtle Philidor, the dependable Mayot mount their attacks; it’s there that you witness the most astonishing moves and that you hear the most stupid conversation; for if one may be both a wit and a fine chess player like Legal, one may also be a fine chess player and an idiot like Foubert and Mayot. While I was there one evening, watching everything, not saying much and listening as little as possible, I was accosted by one of the most bizarre characters in this country, to which God has granted its fair share. He is a composite of nobility and baseness, good sense and irrationality. The concepts of honour and dishonour must surely be strangely jumbled in his head, for he makes no parade of the good qualities which nature has given him, and, for the bad, evinces no shame. He is, what’s more, endowed with a strong constitution, an exceptionally vivid imagination, and an uncommonly powerful pair of lungs. If ever you meet him, and aren’t stopped in your tracks by his singularity, then either you’ll stick your fingers in your ears or you’ll take to your heels. God, what terrible lungs. Nothing could be more unlike him than he himself is. Sometimes he’s thin and gaunt, like a consumptive on his deathbed; you could count his teeth through the skin of his cheeks. You’d think that he’d gone several days without food, or just come out of a Trappist monastery. The following month he’s fat and paunchy, as if he’d never left the table of a tax farmer, or had been confined in a Bernardine monastery. One day, in grubby linen, torn breeches, and rags, virtually barefoot, he goes about with his head down, avoiding people, and you’d be tempted to call him over and slip him a coin or two. The next, powdered, shod, curled, well dressed, he goes about with head high, he wants to be noticed, and you’d be likely to take him for a gentleman, or near enough. He lives from day to day. Downcast or cheerful, depending on the circumstances. His first concern, on rising in the morning, is to determine where he’ll have lunch; after lunch, he considers where he’ll go to dine. Night brings its own anxieties. Either he’ll return, on foot, to his tiny garret, unless his landlady, weary of asking for his rent, has demanded his key back; or he’ll take refuge in an outlying tavern to await the dawn over a crust of bread and a jug of beer. When he hasn’t a penny in his pocket, which happens from time to time, he resorts to a friend who drives a cab or to a great lord’s coachman, who lets him sleep on the straw, beside the horses. The next morning part of his mattress is still in his hair. If the weather’s mild he spends the night striding up and down the Cours-la-Reine or the Champs-Elysées.* Dawn finds him back in the city, dressed in yesterday’s clothes for today, and occasionally for the rest of the week. I hold such eccentrics in low esteem. Others seek out their companionship, even their friendship. As for me, maybe once a year I like to stop and spend time with them, because their character contrasts sharply with other men’s, and they break with that tedious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our customary proprieties have produced. If one of them appears in a group, he’s like a grain of yeast that ferments, and restores to each of us his natural individuality. He shocks us, he stirs us up; he forces us to praise or blame; he brings out the truth; he identifies honourable men and unmasks scoundrels; it is then that the man of good sense keeps his ears open, and takes the measure of his companions.

  I knew this one from a long while back. He frequented a household where his talents had made him welcome. An only daughter lived there. He used to swear to the mother and father that he’d marry the daughter. They’d shrug, laugh in his face, tell him he was crazy, yet I saw it actually happen. He’d ask me for a few écus, and I’d let him have them. He’d insinuated himself, by what means I do not know, into a number of respectable houses where he was given a seat at the dinner table, on condition that he never spoke without first asking permission. He would keep silent, and swallow his fury with his food. It was wonderful to see him thus constrained. Should he be tempted to break the treaty and open his mouth, at the first word all the guests would exclaim ‘Oh! Rameau!’ and his eyes would flash with rage as he set about swallowing his food even more furiously. You were curious to learn the name of the man; well, now you know it. He’s the nephew of that famous musician who rescued us from Lully’s plainchant, which we’d been droning out for over a hundred years; who wrote such reams of incomprehensible visions and apocalyptic verities on the theory of music, of which neither he nor anyone else ever understood a word, and who left us with a number of operas where we can enjoy various harmonies, unfinished songs, unrelated ideas, uproars, flights, triumphal fanfares, spears, ennoblements, seditious whisperings, endless victories; he also left us dance tunes that will live forever; he buried the Florentine, and will in his turn be buried by the Italian virtuosi; this he foresaw and it made him gloomy, depressed, cantankerous; for no one is as ill humoured, not even a pretty woman who wakes up with a pimple on her nose, as an author in danger of outliving his reputation—witness Marivaux and Crébillon the younger.

  He addresses me: ‘Aha! So it’s you, Master Philosopher; and what are you doing here in this company of idlers? Wasting your time too, pushing the wood about?’ (That’s how the scornful refer to playing chess, or draughts.)

  ME : No, but when I’ve nothing better to do, I enjoy spending a few minutes watching those who push it well.

  HIM : In that case, you rarely enjoy yourself; apart from Legal and Philidor, the rest haven’t a clue about the game.

  ME : But what about Monsieur de Bissy?

  HIM : That man’s to chess, what Mademoiselle Clairon is to acting. Both have mastered everything that can be learnt about their respective playing.

  ME : You’re hard to please; I can see you’ll allow nothing short of sublime perfection.

  HIM : Yes, in chess, draughts, poetry, eloquence, music, and other such twaddle. What use is mediocrity in those genres?

  ME : Very little, I grant you. But you need a great many people working in them to enable the man of genius to emerge. He’s one in a million. But enough of that. It’s ages since I saw you. I almost never think of you, unless I see you. But I’m always pleased when I do. What have you been up to?

  HIM : What you, I, and everyone else are up to: good and bad, and nothing at all. Also I’ve felt hungry, and I’ve eaten, when I’ve had the chance; after
eating, I’ve felt thirsty, and sometimes I’ve had a drink. Meanwhile, my beard’s grown; and when it’s grown, I’ve had it shaved.

  ME : That was a mistake. It’s the only thing you lack to make you a sage.

  HIM : Yes, indeed. My forehead’s high and furrowed; my eye full of passion; my nose hooked; my cheeks broad; my eyebrows black and bushy; my mouth well defined, with full lips; my chin square. If that enormous chin were covered with a long beard it would look very fine in bronze or marble, you know.

  ME : Alongside a Caesar, a Marcus Aurelius, a Socrates.

  HIM : No, I’d feel more at home between Diogenes and Phryne. I’m as shameless as the one and I’m a regular customer of the other.

  ME : And you’re still keeping well?

  HIM : Yes, generally speaking, although not so wonderful today.

  ME : Really? You’ve a paunch on you like Silenus’s; and your face…

  HIM : A face as fat as its posterior counterpart. That’s because the ill humour that’s shrivelling up my dear uncle seems to be fattening his dear nephew.

  ME : Speaking of the uncle, do you ever see him?

  HIM : Yes, in the street, in passing.

  ME : Doesn’t he help you out at all?

  HIM : If ever he helps anyone, it’s without being aware of it. In his own way he’s a philosopher; he doesn’t give a damn for the rest of the universe. His wife and daughter can go ahead and die whenever they like; as long as the parish bells, which will toll for them, continue to sound the twelfth and seventeenth intervals, all will be well. He’s fortunate in that way; and it’s what I value above all else in men of genius. They’re good for one thing only. Other than that, nothing. They don’t know what it means to be citizen, father, mother, brother, relative, friend. Just between you and me, one should imitate them in every way; but not wish the breed to be commonplace. We need men, but geniuses, no. No, my goodness, we don’t need them. It is they who change the face of the world; and, even in the most trifling things, stupidity is so universal and so powerful that it can’t be reformed without a great to-do. Part of their reform is carried out. The rest stays as before; result: two gospels, a two-coloured Harlequin costume. The wisdom of Rabelais’s monk is the true wisdom, for his own peace and that of others: do your duty, after a fashion; always speak well of the Prior; and let the world live as it pleases.* This works well, since the majority is content with it. If I knew history, I’d show you that evil has always come into our world through some man of genius. But I don’t know history, because I don’t know anything. Devil take me if I’ve ever learnt a thing—and if, because I’ve never learnt a thing, I’m any the worse off. I was dining one day as the guest of one of the King’s ministers, who’s as clever as they come; well, he proved to us, as clearly as two and two make four, that nothing is more useful to the common people than lies; nothing more harmful than the truth. I can’t quite remember his proofs; still, the upshot is obviously that men of genius are detestable, and that if, at birth, a child bore on its forehead the stamp of this dangerous gift of nature, it ought to be smothered, or flung into the river with the rubbish.