The Nun (Oxford World's Classics)

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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  Diderot, Dennis, 1713–1784.

  [Religieuse. English]

  The nun/Denis Diderot; translated with an introduction and notes by Russell Goulbourne.

  p. cm. —(Oxford world’s classics)

  Summary: ‘This novel takes the life of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent as its subject matter and provides an insight into the effects of forced vocations’ —Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  I. Goulbourne, Russell. II. Title. III. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)

  PQ1979.A76E5 2005 843′.5—dc22 2004024150

  ISBN 0–19–280430–8

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  DENIS DIDEROT

  The Nun

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  RUSSELL GOULBOURNE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE NUN

  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.

  RUSSELL GOULBOURNE is Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on early modern French literature and has contributed to the new critical edition of Voltaire’s complete works.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Denis Diderot

  THE NUN

  PREFACE TO THE PRECEDING WORK

  Explanatory Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I should like to thank David Coward for encouraging me to undertake this translation, Jennifer Cooper, Nicholas Cronk, Nick Hammond, Olive Sayce, and Tom Wynn for generously giving me their help and advice, and Judith Luna for being such a kind and patient editor. My greatest debt, though, is to Michael Hawcroft, whose help and support have been as selfless as they have been ceaseless: to him this volume is gratefully dedicated.

  INTRODUCTION

  Diderot: An Enlightenment Polymath

  BY the time The Nun (La Religieuse) was first published in book form, in 1796, Diderot had been dead for twelve years. The timing would have suited him perfectly. In an age of enlightened self-publicists and literary celebrities, Diderot dared to be different. Unlike his near-contemporary Voltaire, for instance, who was loath to leave any piece of writing unpublished and who positively enjoyed courting controversy, Diderot avoided conflict with the authorities by composing works like The Nun, Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques le fataliste), and D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de d’Alembert) without thought of conventional publication in his lifetime, ‘writing for the desk drawer’ (‘pisat’ v yashchik’), as it was known in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The result is that many of what we now regard as his best and most important works were unknown to his contemporaries.

  So how was Diderot viewed by his contemporaries? They saw him first and foremost as the joint editor, together with the mathematician and scientist Jean d’A
lembert, of the Encyclopaedia (L’Encyclopédie). What began in 1746 as a project to translate into French and expand Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, the first true English encyclopedia, published in 1728, quickly grew into something much more ambitious. In fact, it grew into seventeen large volumes of text, together with eleven volumes of plates, published between 1751 and 1772. The result is a vast and collaborative dictionary of the knowledge of the day (some 72,000 articles by more than 140 contributors), an extensive account of the arts, sciences, and technology of modern Europe written from the reforming standpoint of the philosophes, the free-thinking intellectuals of the day.

  The Encyclopaedia became the Bible of the Enlightenment, the name given to the intellectual tidal wave that washed across Europe, and particularly France, in the eighteenth century, eroding superstition, conventional thinking, and received wisdom, and ushering in new modes of critical thought. The Enlightenment set out above all to challenge and demystify traditional religious authority, in particular the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But this was an age when thought and expression were still rigorously policed. In the late 1750s the authorities stepped up their war against the philosophes, whose possible subversive influence had been highlighted by François Damiens’s attempt to assassinate Louis XV on 5 January 1757, the eve of the Epiphany, la fête des Rois. In 1759 the Parlement of Paris banned further publication of the Encyclopaedia (a ban that proved ineffectual, since, thanks to the collusion of the authorities, the remaining volumes were published unofficially), and the work was put on the Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books. The persecution of the philosophes may have contributed to the virulence of the satire in The Nun.

  But editing, and contributing to, the Encyclopaedia was not enough for Diderot. He was a great all-rounder, a true polymath. By the time he wrote The Nun in 1760, he had already made his name in a number of other domains. By the 1740s he was known as a philosopher. His first major publication was an annotated translation of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (1745), preceded by an open letter to his brother, who had become a priest, in which he offers a critique of religious intolerance. This was followed, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, by a series of philosophical works of his own, notably the Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles, 1749), Diderot’s first radically subversive work, which earned him a brief spell in prison, from where he was released only when he promised to do nothing subsequently which was in any way contrary to orthodox religion or morality.

  Throughout these philosophical works Diderot moves away from English-inspired deism, which posited the existence of an intelligent creator as proved by the order and harmony of the universe, and towards a more radical position which can be best described as materialist atheism. Materialism holds that whatever exists is either matter or entirely dependent on matter for its existence; it consequently denies the existence of non-material things, in particular God. God is irrelevant; matter is all that matters. Since matter is the only reality and everything that exists is the product of molecular chemistry, it follows, for Diderot, that each individual is pre-programmed by their physiology and determined by the particular environment in which they find themselves. Diderot’s materialism would find its most powerful expression in a group of dialogues entitled D’Alembert’s Dream, written in 1769 but unpublished until the nineteenth century; it would also inform one of the underlying premisses of The Nun.

  In the second half of the 1750s, Diderot also made his name as a dramatist. He was the driving force behind the drame bourgeois, or bourgeois drama. The drame was intended as a serious play in prose about contemporary middle-class life. Diderot wanted to sweep away the traditional French generic division, which had existed since the seventeenth century, between comedy and tragedy: comedies were designed to make audiences laugh at ordinary people; tragedies were designed to make audiences cry by feeling pity and fear for the likes of kings and queens. Diderot wanted to create a genre mid-way between these two extremes: he wanted audiences to feel pity for ordinary people. So he wrote two such drames, The Natural Son (Le Fils naturel, 1757) and The Father of the Family (Le Père de famille, 1758), to show his ideas in practice, and he attached to each play a theoretical work, the Conversations about ‘The Natural Son’ (Entretiens sur le Fils naturel) and the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry (Discours sur la poésie dramatique) respectively. Diderot’s approach to drama was innovative, and it was to lay the foundation stone for modern European drama.

  Also in the late 1750s Diderot became increasingly interested in the visual arts. In 1759 he wrote the first of his Salons, accounts of the biennial exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon carré at the Louvre, in Paris. These exhibitions were a Parisian institution, major events open free of charge to all social classes. Diderot’s Salons are generally regarded as marking the beginning of art criticism in France: Diderot turned banal journalism into a high-minded art form. Fascinated by the links between the verbal and the visual, he wrote nine Salons between 1759 and 1781, describing the works of art for readers who had not seen them: he transposed visual objects into words. His Salons first appeared in the pages of the Literary Correspondence (Correspondance littéraire), a handwritten journal, edited between 1753 and 1773 by Frédéric-Melchior Grimm and between 1773 and 1793 by Jacques-Henri Meister. It was distributed to a small number of wealthy and titled subscribers throughout Europe, including Catherine the Great. And it was in the Literary Correspondence that The Nun was first to appear.

  This brings us to the last strand in the richly textured fabric of Diderot’s career: his fiction. Diderot’s first foray into fiction was The Indiscreet Jewels (Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1748), an erotic novel about an African monarch, Mangogul, who has a magic ring, one turn of which will make a woman’s genitals speak the truth about what the woman has been doing in the bedroom. Thirty trials of the ring fail to produce a single example of a wife who is faithful to her husband: satire and intellectual enquiry combine, as they will in The Nun. After The Indiscreet Jewels, Diderot let fiction-writing lie fallow for more than ten years, returning to it only in 1760, when he wrote The Nun. He began Rameau’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau) in 1761, though it was not published until 1821. In the late 1760s and the 1770s he wrote a number of short stories and dialogues, including This is not a Story (Ceci n’est pas un conte) and The Two Friends from Bourbonne (Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne), and he started writing his experimental anti-novel Jacques the Fatalist, which, like The Nun, was not published until 1796.

  Diderot returned to fiction in the 1760s because of Samuel Richardson. Richardson’s three epistolary novels, Pamela (1742), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1754), enjoyed a huge success in France, thanks in part to the prompt publication of translations of them. Diderot published an important Eulogy of Richardson (Éloge de Richardson) in 1762, shortly after the English novelist’s death in 1761. Hitherto, Diderot argues in his Eulogy, novels have been scorned, relegated to the bottom division in the literary hierarchy, dismissed as so much frivolous froth, if not downright immoral. But Richardson has changed all that, writing novels that offer a lifelike rendering of the real world, a vision of human experience, a source of knowledge and wisdom, emotionally charged and morally uplifting. The reader believes in the truth of what he is reading, he becomes involved in the text, and this involvement is essential to the text’s moral impact. The power of the fictional illusion brings about aesthetic participation, and that paves the way for moral renewal. It is precisely this kind of Richardsonian reading experience that Diderot seems to be trying to recreate in The Nun.

  Nuns and Novels: Fact into Fiction

  If Diderot wanted to transpose reality into art, he only had to look at the society in which he lived to find material. Diderot wrote his novel about nuns at a time when nuns were numerous and convents were commonplace. Convents were integrated to a remarkable degree into the polite society of eighteenth-century France. If respectable parents could not marry
off their daughter, perhaps for lack of a dowry or because she was unattractive in some other way (for example, if she was illegitimate, as Diderot’s fictional heroine is), the natural thing for them to do was to send her off to a convent to become a nun. The result was that in the middle of the eighteenth century, one Frenchwoman in every two hundred was a nun. France was home to about 5,000 convents containing some 55,000 nuns, compared to about 3,000 monasteries and about 30,000 monks. France was in fact unique in Europe in possessing so many more nuns than monks.

  But if convents were commonplace, they were also enigmatic; they were places of teasing fascination for those (men) who had never set foot inside their cloistered walls; they were an intriguing no man’s land. This fascination is reflected in fiction. The Portuguese Letters (Lettres portugaises), a slim volume of five letters published anonymously in 1669 and purportedly written by a deserted Portuguese nun to her unfaithful French lover, effectively fixed the view of the nun as unhappy in love, the convent setting serving to underline the cloistered victim’s predicament. These letters are now generally accepted as the fictional work of one Vicomte de Guilleragues, but until relatively recently readers believed that the letters were real, an effect that Diderot seems to have been aiming to recreate in trying to pass off his work as the memoir of a real nun.

  In addition to the Portuguese Letters, there also stretches behind The Nun a long tradition of male-authored libertine, quasipornographic novels, in which the convent, which is supposed to be a place of continence and self-denial, becomes instead a highly charged site of sexual fantasy. The starting point for this tradition seems to be Jean Barrin’s Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in her Chemise (Vénus dans le cloître, ou la religieuse en chemise), written in about 1680 but first published in 1719, a text that suggestively intertwines religious and sexual libertinism, blasphemy and lust. A flurry of similar tales duly followed, including, for example, Gervais de La Touche’s The Carthusians’ Porter (Le Portier des Chartreux, 1745), the story of the sexual initiation of the young and naive Suzon at the hands of a more experienced sister.