Word: diderot
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...article concerning the finding of manuscripts of Diderot's interested me very much. The accompanying picture by Meissonier . . . brought to mind a story...
...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...
...meeting of scholars in Manhattan, Dieckmann told what else he had found. He had not uncovered the original manuscript of the Dream, but there were plenty of other treasures. He had found letters, notebooks, 31 manuscripts, 19 works never published, an essay by the philosopher Helvetius with Diderot's furious comments in the margins...
...baron had lent them all to Dieckmann, and he had brought them home with him to St. Louis. All in all, to the tiny band of Diderot scholars it was the greatest discovery ever. It would mean a complete new look at the man Dieckmann holds was certainly "on a level with Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu." For students of the 18th Century, Dieckmann's find was beaten only by one other: the discovery of the Boswell Malahide papers (TIME, Nov. 29), which had also turned up forgotten in an ancient castle...