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

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  Diderot, Denis, 1713–1784.

  [Neveu de Rameau. English]

  Rameau’s nephew; and, First satire / Denis Diderot; translated by Margaret Mauldon;

  with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Cronk.

  p. cm. — (Oxford world’s classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  I. Mauldon, Margaret. II. Cronk, Nicholas. III. Diderot, Denis, 1713–1784.

  Satire première. English. IV. Title. V. Title: First satire. VI. Series: Oxford world’s

  classics (Oxford University Press)

  PQ1979.A66E5 2006 848.5’08—dc22 2006011792

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  ISBN 0–19–280591–6 978–0–19–280591–1

  1

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  DENIS DIDEROT

  Rameau’s Nephew

  and

  First Satire

  Translated by

  MARGARET MAULDON

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  NICHOLAS CRONK

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

  AND

  FIRST SATIRE

  DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784) was born at Langres in Champagne, the son of a master cutler who wanted him to follow a career in the Church. He attended the best Paris schools, took a degree in theology in 1735 but turned away from religion and tried his hand briefly at law before deciding to make his way as a translator and writer. In 1746, he was invited to provide a French version of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728). The project became the Encyclopaedia (Encyclopédie, 1751–72), intended to be a compendium of human knowledge in all fields but also the embodiment of the new ‘philosophic’ spirit of intellectual enquiry. As editor-in-chief, Diderot became the impresario of the French Enlightenment. But ideas were dangerous, and in 1749 Diderot was imprisoned for four months for publishing opinions judged contrary to religion and the public good. He became a star of the salons, where he was known as a brilliant conversationalist. He invented art criticism, and devised a new form of theatre which would determine the shape of European drama. But in private he pursued ideas of startling orginality in texts like Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville) and D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de d’Alembert), which for the most part were not published until after his death. He anticipated DNA, Darwin, and modern genetics, but also discussed the human and ethical implications of biological materialism in fictions—The Nun (La Religieuse), Rameau’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau), and Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques le fataliste)—which seem more at home in our century than in his. His life, spent among books, was uneventful and he rarely strayed far from Paris. In 1773, though, he travelled to St Petersburg to meet his patron, Catherine II. But his hopes of persuading her to implement his ‘philosophic’ ideas failed, and in 1774 he returned to Paris where he continued talking and writing until his death in 1784.

  MARGARET MAULDON has worked as a translator since 1987. For Oxford World’s Classics she has translated Zola’s L’Assommoir, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, Constant’s Adolphe, Huysmans’s Against Nature (winner of the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, 1999), and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

  NICHOLAS CRONK is Director of the Voltaire Foundation and General Editor of The Complete Works of Voltaire, and Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Denis Diderot

  RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

  FIRST SATIRE

  Appendix: Goethe on Rameau’s Nephew

  Explanatory Notes

  Glossary of Names

  INTRODUCTION

  Man is said to be a Sociable Animal

  (ADDISON)

  Rameau’s Nephew—in French, Le Neveu de Rameau—is a work of dazzling paradox, an exploration of the contradictions and complexities of man as ‘sociable animal’ which is in every way unique. It is arguably the greatest work of the French Enlightenment’s greatest writer; yet it was unknown in the century in which it was written. Not one of Denis Diderot’s contemporaries mentions the text, and Diderot himself makes no clear reference to it in his private correspondence. Everything about the book—When was it written? Who was it written for? What is it about?—remains tantalizingly uncertain. Even its public
ation is uniquely odd.

  When Diderot died, the manuscript of this unpublished work passed with his other manuscripts to his daughter Mme de Vandeul and her husband; Diderot’s prudish son-in-law was apparently shocked by many of these works, and piously bowdlerized those in his care. Luckily, another set of manuscripts had been carefully copied for Catherine the Great, who, in an act of great enlightenment, had bought Diderot’s books and papers in 1765 in exchange for a pension paid during his lifetime. An autograph manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew was therefore sent to St Petersburg after Diderot’s death in 1784, and some years later it fell into the hands of Klinger, a German dramatist and officer then posted in Russia. Through him, the document found its way back to Germany and to Schiller, who in turn showed it to Goethe; the latter was enchanted by the work and immediately set to translating it. And so it came about that this work of Diderot’s first appeared in print in 1805 in Leipzig, as Rameaus Neffe, Goethe accompanying his translation with an extended commentary on the text (extracts from this commentary will be found in the Appendix). Then in 1821 the French version of the text was published for the first time, in Paris. Except that it was not Diderot’s text at all, but a fraudulent retranslation back into French of Goethe’s German version (with some obscenities added for good measure). This stimulated the publication of another edition in 1823, the so-called Brière edition. This was based on the corrupted Vandeul manuscript (with the obscenities removed), and so was equally inauthentic. Other editions followed in the course of the nineteenth century, all based on manuscripts of dubious provenance. Then, one day in 1890, Georges Monval, the librarian of the Comédie-Française, was visiting the bouquinistes on the Quai de Voltaire along the Seine and came across a manuscript with the title ‘Second Satire’ which he recognized as an autograph of Le Neveu de Rameau. He bought it, and the following year published what is the first reliable edition of the text. The manuscript which he discovered, after its long European travels, has today come to rest in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. This is a story, then, of a French book first published in German, because a French manuscript sent from Paris to St Petersburg found its way to Germany before travelling to Paris and ending up in New York: it is a fiction worthy of Borges, or of Diderot.

  To begin with, when did Diderot write Rameau’s Nephew? Since there are no references to the work in Diderot’s lifetime, we are thrown back on the internal evidence of the text itself, which is of course crowded with specific incidents and anecdotes. Many of these are datable with some precision, though here too the work continues to baffle us. Its overall satirical thrust is aimed at the enemies of Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists who were active in the early 1760s, and one whole group of references—the liaison between Bertin and Mlle Hus, for example, or the allusion to the Opéra in the Rue Saint-Honoré, which burned down in 1763—all point to a date for the action somewhere between 1760 and 1762. But many other allusions belong to a later date: the reference to Voltaire’s defence of Maupeou, for example, is to an event of 1771; a reference to Sabatier’s Three Centuries to a work of 1772. All we can say with certainty is that there is no clear allusion to any incident before 1760, and none to any later than 1774. The chronological references are, moreover, inconsistent. The celebrated composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, uncle of ‘Him’, died in Paris in 1764: at one point in the text he is referred to as having already died, at another point as being alive. A mistake on the part of Diderot? Perhaps. Or perhaps a deliberate inconsistency designed to jolt the reader into realizing that all is not what it seems.

  There are broadly two views about how and when the text was written. Jean Fabre, the scholar who produced the first modern scholarly edition of this work in 1950, dates its beginnings to around 1761, and considers that Diderot went on adding to it over the years until it reached its final form around 1774. More recently, Henri Coulet has argued against this view, suggesting that the dialogue was composed in one creative burst around 1773. He maintains that the organized structure of the book precludes the possibility of its having been composed piecemeal over an extended period, and argues that the multiplicity of allusions to events in the early 1760s are part of a self-consciously nostalgic attempt to re-create in the 1770s the atmosphere of the earlier period. These arguments about genesis are important insofar as they provide clues for the interpretation of this baffling work.

  In the first place, what is at issue here is a view of the work’s ‘unity’. It was long fashionable to speak of a disorderly and chaotic text, a reflection, so the argument ran, of Diderot’s own expansive and exuberant personality. He was famously a great talker (as Boswell, among others, noted), and so it seemed natural that he should have created a work featuring two great talkers. For critics to argue in this way seems to suggest a need to excuse what is seen as the incoherence and muddle of the work, and it is also to succumb to a nineteenth-century stereotype of Diderot as a confused and flawed thinker. Coulet’s bold assertion that this is a coherent and artfully crafted work challenges us to read it afresh.

  Secondly, the arguments about chronology help us to identify the events which stimulated Diderot to write this work, and to place it in his career. Diderot arrived in Paris as a young man to pursue his studies, and began to earn a living by translating books from English. His first original piece of writing was a small, anonymous work entitled Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques), in which he attacked the Christian critique of passion, and hinted darkly at atheism and materialism. The work predictably aroused a furore, and three years later another controversial work, his Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles), led to his imprisonment at Vincennes for four months. Thereafter he was preoccupied for many years with the editing of the Encyclopedia (Encyclopédie), and throughout that period he was obliged to struggle with the authorities to keep the project alive. Voltaire, from the safe distance of Ferney, near Geneva, advised Diderot to leave Paris, but he stuck it out, publishing the volumes in defiance of the threat of censorship and the risk of further imprisonment.

  The royal road to literary respectability in eighteenth-century France was through the theatre, and Diderot’s first play, The Natural Son (Le Fils naturel), performed in 1757, landed him in hot water: first Jean-Jacques Rousseau took public offence at a line in the play that he felt was critical of him and ended their friendship, then Diderot found himself accused of having plagiarized the Italian dramatist Goldoni. Prominent among his critics was Charles Palissot, and worse was to come in 1760 when Palissot parodied all the philosophes and encyclopedists in his play The Philosophes (Les Philosophes), which enjoyed a noisy success at the Comédie-Française. Diderot was singled out in this play for heavy-handed satirical treatment, but, given the delicacy of his situation regarding the Encyclopédie, he was effectively powerless to reply. The ever-present danger of censorship meant that Diderot had to lead a double literary life, with the result that at the time of his death, in 1784, he was remembered first and foremost as the editor of the Encyclopédie. Many of his other works, those which today we regard as his masterpieces—Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques le fataliste), The Nun (La Religieuse), his art criticism—had been ‘published’ only in a limited number of manuscript copies in the Correspondance littéraire, and remained therefore unknown to a wider reading public until the nineteenth century. (The Correspondance littéraire was a manuscript journal containing cultural and other news, halfway between a private letter and a printed periodical, which was produced fortnightly and circulated exclusively to a limited number of the crowned heads of Europe.) And then there was Rameau’s Nephew, which was not published in any form whatsoever, but which Diderot carefully copied and preserved for the readers of a future generation.

  The work is many things, but at one level it is clearly Diderot’s settling of accounts with Palissot, his revenge on those enemies of the Encyclopédie who continued to harass him all his working life. Jean Fabre believed that the work was an intimate affair, written by Diderot purely for his own privat
e pleasure. Certainly it is true that the text is crammed with elusive references to people and events, and despite the heroic efforts of editors (in particular Fabre, whose pioneering edition has 334 notes), we will never understand fully all the allusions. But does this matter? The very fact that we cannot grasp every last detail of the gossip powerfully conveys to us the confined atmosphere of the literary underworld that Diderot is describing. But Fabre’s view that this is a private work should not encourage us to read it only as some sort of autobiographical or confessional text, concerned simply with Diderot’s recollections of the opponents of Enlightenment.

  Rameau’s Nephew also, more importantly, addresses and questions some of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment. That it does so with such a light touch and so elusively makes its enquiry more, not less, complex. Two men sit in a café and talk; they discuss morals and music, and they tell stories. The whole exchange is deceptively casual, notwithstanding the extraordinary physical outbursts of ‘Him’ when he finds himself, literally, at a loss for words. At the heart of these seemingly aimless discussions is a preoccupation with man as a creature of society. ‘Man is said to be a Sociable Animal …’: so begins one of Addison’s Spectator essays (no. 9, 1711). The expression is borrowed from Aristotle’s Politics, but Addison develops the idea in a way characteristic of his century: ‘… and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of Clubs.’1 We think of the Enlightenment as an era of empirical enquiry, in which long-standing beliefs in science and religion were subjected to rational scrutiny. This emphasis on the triumph of reason over superstition can make the period seem a dry one—that at least was the caricature that would be fostered by the Romantic generation. But beyond this fresh emphasis on the power of reason, the ideas of the Enlightenment give to the men and women of the eighteenth century a reinvigorated sense of what it means to be ‘human’. Addison’s whimsical excursus on the nature of clubs recognizes an important form of sociability, and sets the tone for much of the rest of the century: works like Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) or Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) signal the beginnings of study of what we would now call the ‘human’ sciences, the study of man’s social relationships with his fellow man (and so, by implication, a shift away from theology, and the study of man’s metaphysical relationship with God).