Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Once, the two philosophers were names that made news. "Ye gods!" a nobleman of Paris exclaimed. "Everywhere I go, I hear talk of nobody but this Rousseau and this Diderot . . . People of the lowest sort, people who do not even own their own houses, who live on the fourth floor . . ." Today, except for a few scholars, people talk a good deal less about Diderot than they do of Rousseau. Students who learn of Diderot in college are apt to classify him as one of the great French Encyclopedists, learn too little of his novels, plays and essays. If they remembered...
...responsible for the new interest in Diderot had been a fan for most of his life. But even to German-born Herbert Dieckmann, now a professor of Romance languages at St. Louis' Washington University, Diderot the man was still a "fantastic and unbelievable enigma." For one thing, most of his original manuscripts had disappeared...
...Fishy Sound. Dieckmann had a hunch that Diderot had never really destroyed the manuscript of his great philosophical dialogue, D'Alembert's Dream, though one contemporary declared that Diderot had burned it and another said he had torn it up. "The whole thing sounded fishy to me," says Dieckmann...
...Dieckmann went from Germany to France, told other scholars his theory that the Diderot manuscript was still in existence somewhere. One day a scholar casually remarked that he thought he might have seen the Dream while going through the family papers of a certain Baron Jacques Le Vavasseur, Diderot's direct descendant. Apparently, Diderot's daughter had passed on a whole batch of papers to her descendants. The family had let only two untrained amateurs take a look: it thought the less said about Diderot's escapades and radical ideas the better. Dieckmann got only a curt...
...Dieckmann began searching the castle. For eight days he ransacked boxes in a closet of the servants' quarters. Finally, he had emptied the closet-except for a bunch of papers lying loose and uncovered at the back. There, the fourth paper he pulled out proved to be a Diderot manuscript that scholars had never known of before...