Word: dieckmann
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Professor Herbert Dieckmann, head of Washington's Romance Languages department, calls it "a clear violation of academic freedom...
...Castle Closet. Not until last summer, 18 years later, did Dieckmann, now a U.S. citizen, get back to France. This time, he wrote, telephoned and called on the baron. Finally, the baron told him to go out to his castle outside Fécamp: there were some papers there...
Next day, 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...
This week, at a 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...