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

170 Pages·2006·1.22 MB·English

by  Denis Diderot

 ’ 
RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

FIRST SATIRE
D D (–) 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  but
turned away from religion and tried his hand briefly at law before deciding
to make his way as a translator and writer. In , he was invited to
provide a French version of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia ().
The project became the Encyclopaedia (Encyclopédie,–), 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 Enlighten-
ment. But ideas were dangerous, and in  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 Sup-
plement to Bougainville’s Voyage (Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville)
andD’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 implica-
tions 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 , though, he travelled to St Petersburg to meet his patron,
Catherine II. But his hopes of persuading her to implement his ‘philo-
sophic’ ideas failed, and in  he returned to Paris where he continued
talking and writing until his death in .
M M has worked as a translator since .
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, ), and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
N C 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.
 ’ 
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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
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
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Translation © Margaret Mauldon, 2006
Appendix © Christopher Wells, 2006
Editorial material © Nicholas Cronk, 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
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ISBN 0–19–280591–6 978–0–19–280591–1
1
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxvi
Select Bibliography xxvii
A Chronology of Denis Diderot xxxi
RAMEAU’S NEPHEW 
FIRST SATIRE 
Appendix: Goethe on Rameau’s Nephew 
Explanatory Notes 
Glossary of Names 
v
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INTRODUCTION
Man is said to be a Sociable Animal
(A)
Rameau’s Nephew––in French, Le Neveu de Rameau––is a work of
dazzling paradox, an exploration of the contradictions and com-
plexities 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 publication is uniquely odd.
When Diderot died, the manuscript of this unpublished work
passed with his other manuscripts to his daughter Mme de Van-
deul and her husband; Diderot’s prudish son-in-law was appar-
ently 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  in
exchange for a pension paid during his lifetime. An autograph
manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew was therefore sent to St Peters-
burg after Diderot’s death in , 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 trans-
lating it. And so it came about that this work of Diderot’s first
appeared in print in  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  the French version of the text was
vii
Introduction
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 , the so-called Brière edition. This was
based on the corrupted Vandeul manuscript (with the obscenities
removed), and so was equally inauthentic. Other editions fol-
lowed in the course of the nineteenth century, all based on manu-
scripts of dubious provenance. Then, one day in , 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 rec-
ognized 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 s, 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
––all point to a date for the action somewhere between 
and . But many other allusions belong to a later date: the
reference to Voltaire’s defence of Maupeou, for example, is to an
event of ; a reference to Sabatier’s Three Centuries to a work
of . All we can say with certainty is that there is no clear
viii
Introduction
allusion to any incident before , and none to any later than
. The chronological references are, moreover, inconsistent.
The celebrated composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, uncle of ‘Him’,
died in Paris in : 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 inconsis-
tency 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 , dates its beginnings to
around , and considers that Diderot went on adding to it
over the years until it reached its final form around . More
recently, Henri Coulet has argued against this view, suggesting
that the dialogue was composed in one creative burst around
. He maintains that the organized structure of the book pre-
cludes the possibility of its having been composed piecemeal over
an extended period, and argues that the multiplicity of allusions
to events in the early s are part of a self-consciously nostalgic
attempt to re-create in the s 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 expan-
sive 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 con-
fused 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
ix