Word: manuscript
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...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...
...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...
Before we could get out of the room a Cambridge lady materialized at the door with a manuscript she wanted Miss Cam to read. A quick appointment was made, and we started out for the Cam suite in the Hotel Commander...