One night Desglands’ château was attacked by Mandrin’s gang. Jacques recognized the residence of his benefactor and his mistress, interceded and preserved the château from being plundered.
We then come to the passage which describes the pathetic details of the unexpected encounter of Jacques, his master, Desglands, Denise and Jeanne.
‘Is that you, my friend?’
‘Is that you, my dear master?’
‘How did you come to be with these people?’
‘And how is it that I find you here? Is that you, Denise?’
‘Is that you, Monsieur Jacques? How you made me cry!’
Meanwhile Desglands shouted out: ‘Bring glasses and wine quickly. He has saved all our lives.’
A few days afterwards the old concierge of the château died. Jacques secured his place and married Denise, with whom he occupied himself in raising disciples of Zeno and Spinoza, loved by Desglands, cherished by his master and adored by his wife, for thus was it written up above.
It has been claimed that his master and Desglands fell in love with his wife. I do not know if this is true but I am sure that at night he used to say to himself:
If it is written up above that you will be cuckolded, no matter what you do you will be. If, however, it is written up above that you will not be cuckolded, no matter what they do you won’t be. So sleep, my friend.
And he slept.
NOTES
1. A Belgian village, site of a French victory in 1745 over a combined force of English, Dutch and Imperial troops.
2. The surgeon, like other country surgeons who appear in Jacques, would seem to be a barber-surgeon, occupying a relatively humble position in the medical hierarchy of the period and dealing with minor surgical interventions.
3. French military successes of 1747 and 1756 respectively.
4. Saint Roch, traditionally invoked by plague victims, is sometimes represented as a pilgrim, but is most often recognizable by a sore or boil on his thigh. It is not known whether Diderot was thinking of any particular representation of the saint.
5. This anecdote refers to the Marquis de Castries, wounded fighting in Westphalia in 1762. Dufouart and Louis were prominent French surgeons of the period.
6. This phrase has become a catch-phrase in French, but Diderot’s reference to Harpagon is inaccurate, since the words are spoken by Géronte in Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin, and not by Harpagon in L’Avare.
7. Pontoise and Saint-Germain are small towns situated close to Paris, and no doubt chosen to contrast with the more exotic and far-away places of pilgrimage, Loreto and Compostella.
8. Lieutenant-governor is an approximate translation of ‘lieutenant-général, which, by the eighteenth century, refers to a magistrate appointed by the king and responsible for the administration of justice in and around a fairly important town. This suggests that the town of Conches referred to is the one in Normandy.
9. The reference is to Le Philosophe anglais ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, a very popular novel by the Abbé Prévost, published between 1731 and 1739 and often cited in the eighteenth century as an example of the extravagant adventure-novel.
10. Diderot greatly admired Richardson for his realism. Regnard was the best-known writer of comedies in the generation after Molière, while Sedaine, a contemporary whom Diderot much admired, was a successful writer of comedies and light-opera librettos.
11. The poet has been identified as one Viguier, who published a collection of verse in 1765. Pondicherry was a French possession on the east coast of India, and a prosperous commercial centre in spite of the effects of Anglo-French conflict in India during the eighteenth century.
12. Horace, Ars poetica, ll. 372–3, Mediocribus esse poetis/Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae (‘Neither gods, men nor columns allow poets to be mediocre’). The columns referred to were used for advertising new literary works.
13. Carmelites who followed the reformed rule of Saint John of the Cross. They went barefoot (or rather wore sandals) as a sign of their commitment to a life of austerity.
14. A reference to the earthquake of 1 February 1755, and indirectly, perhaps, to Voltaire’s Candide.
15. Aesop’s master was Xanthos.
16. Diderot refers here to the gardes de la Ferme, that is, to the agents of the great organization which was contracted to levy some of the most important taxes for the kings of France. The system of tax-farming was open to considerable abuse, led to widespread smuggling and tax evasion, and was greatly disliked.
17. Charles le Pelletier, who died in 1756, was widely known for his piety and charitable work.
18. Niccolo Fortiguerra (1674–1735) was the author of Ricciardetto, a burlesque version of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Richardet and Ferragus are characters in Fortiguerra’s work. The continuator of Don Quixote is Luis Aliaga, who published his continuation under the name of Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda.
19. It is not known to whom Diderot might be referring here. The Invalides is the establishment founded by Louis XIV for the relief of old and infirm soldiers.
20. The Reluctant Doctor, by Molière, Act I, scene 1. The original of Gousse is supposed to be one Louis-George Goussier.
21. Both Prémontval and the Pigeons have been identified. It is worth noting, however, that Prémontval had to leave France because of his anti-Christian views, rather than for the reasons given by Diderot.
22. A well-known surgeon of the period. Rousseau refers to him in his Confessions.
23. In the pre-Revolutionary currency, there were twenty sous to the livre (pound) or franc (the terms were often but not always interchangeable). The écu was a silver coin worth three or six livres, and the louis a gold coin worth twenty-four livres. The wages of daily paid workers are reckoned to have been between ten and twenty sous per day.
24. ‘He who goes slowly goes safely… he who goes safely goes far.’
25. Voltaire had objected to the vulgarity of cul-de-sac, cul having the sense of ‘bottom’, but some of the connotations of ‘arse’. French usage followed Voltaire, and impasse replaced cul-de-sac to indicate a dead-end.
26. Prison situated to the south of Paris.
27. The eminent critic Jacques Proust, in a recent critical edition of Jacques, suggests that there is here an allusion to a well-known belief that a heavy hand with the seasoning is a sign of a woman in love.
28. This order is the famous lettre de cachet, which allowed for arrest and detention without trial for indefinite periods. It could easily be used to secure private and personal ends, as in the episode Diderot relates, and came to be seen as one of the most flagrant abuses of the ancien régime.
29. The comte de Saint-Florentin, later duc de La Vrillière, was a favourite of Louis XV and became minister of the royal household. He was held to be somewhat too free in issuing lettres de cachet.
30. Goldoni’s play Le Bourru bienfaisant was written in French and first performed on 4 November 1771. Diderot had been accused, many years earlier, of plagiarizing Goldoni, and this may explain the reference to Goldoni here.
31. A well-known Genevan doctor who enjoyed a high reputation among the intelligentsia of Diderot’s generation.
32. An untranslatable pun. Jason in French is close to jaser, ‘to chatter’.
33. Claude-Louis de Regnier, comte de Guerchy.
34. In other words, the clergy.
35. A tripot was primarily a gambling-den, often maintained with some pretence of respectability by a woman of quality, and equally often functioning as a brothel.
36. In eighteenth-century French usage, the term abbé does not always mean ‘abbot’, but may indicate a priest without specific ecclesiastical duties. It often has pejorative connotations, implying venality, immorality, and lack of belief and vocation.
37. Respected seventeenth-century French churchmen. Dangerous from the anti-Christian perspective of Jacques’ Captain because likely to foster a favourable attitude to the Christian religion.
38. Jansenism, in its seventeenth-century origins, was both a theological tendency, marked by its claim to return to a stricter understanding of certain aspects of the Church’s teaching (particularly on human nature and divine grace), and a rigorist reaction to what were perceived as laxist tendencies in the Church. These, often associated with the Jesuits, came to be referred to as Molinism, after the Spanish Jesuit Molina. It is fair to say that by the second half of the eighteenth century the great issues that had animated controversy in the seventeenth century had in large measure ceased to be of primary importance. Jansenism was petering out into various forms of opposition to the Church hierarchy or to ultramontanism, while Molinism in turn came to mean little more than anti-Jansenism. Madame de La Pommeraye’s dismissive reference may be seen as indicative of her own indifference to matters religious, but also as representative of much of public opinion.
39. A school for the daughters of the nobility was established by Louis XIV’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon, in the convent of Saint-Cyr in 1685. More important, perhaps, is the fact that this is one of several examples of Diderot’s teasing the reader; here, by drawing attention to the ‘romantic’ possibilities offered by the hostess’s own life-story and at the same time refusing it to the reader.
40. A town which was only five miles from Paris.
41. This list of writers of poetics is taken from the title of a work by the abbé Batteux, but typically, Diderot replaces the last author, Despréaux, by Le Bossu merely for the sake of an untranslatable pun – bossu meaning ‘crooked’ or ‘hunch-backed’ in French.
42. Another doctor of Swiss origin admired by Diderot.
43. No one has satisfactorily established whether this list refers to historical persons, nor is it obvious that the effort would be worthwhile.
44. The quarrel between Jacques and his master takes on an added historical and political resonance when one remembers that a jacques was the traditional term of contempt for the French peasant.
45. This passage is probably an allusion to the political conflict between the monarchy and the parlements – particularly that of Paris – in eighteenth-century France. The parlements were the great courts of justice of the kingdom. The parlementaires, the great hereditary magistrates of these courts, claimed to be the defenders of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and used their power to withhold ratification of royal decrees in order to assert their importance.
46. Premonstratensians were an order of regular canons founded by Saint Norbert in 1120. They had a reputation for social exclusiveness.
47. A passage which well illustrates the difficulty that the reader has in deciding on what level to take the philosophical issues advanced in the book.
48. On Jansenism and laxism, see note 38. The Papal Bull Unigenitus was promulgated in 1713. It condemned a number of propositions in a work by the Jansenist Quesnel, and was fiercely opposed for a further fifty years or more. The bishop of Mirepoix had much influence with Louis XV and was hostile to Jansenism.
49. An in pace is a monastic prison cell.
50. Piron was a celebrated wit who died in 1773, and whose works were edited by a rather prudish gentleman called Rigoley de Juvigny. The abbé Vatri was a near-contemporary of Piron and a classical scholar.
51. This reference reflects Diderot’s preoccupation with the commercial pressures that lead artists to betray their talent.
52. The image of the chrysalis and the butterfly is from the Purgatorio, Canto X, ll. 124–6. The references to the heresiarchs, to the treacherous (rather than ungrateful as Diderot terms them) and to the slothful (‘vile’ is closer to Dante) come from the Inferno, Cantos IX, XXXII and XXXIII respectively.
53. The sense of this remark becomes clearer when one learns that from the word for christening cap or bonnet (béguin), French has formed the verb embéguiner, with the secondary meaning of ‘to persuade someone to accept a foolish idea or belief’. Jacques’ meaning is violently anti-Christian.
54. Madame de Parme was the eldest daughter of Louis XV. She died in 1759; the duc de Chevreuse in 1771.
55. The genealogy occurs in the first chapter of Matthew’s gospel.
56. Ferragus, in Fortiguerra’s Ricciardetto, is castrated for attempting to rape a nun. As he lies delirious on his death-bed, Lucifer appears before him, taunting him with the evidence of his lost virility.
57. The reference is to the prince de Condé, one of the greatest French generals of the seventeenth century.
58. La Farce de Maître Pathelin, written in the 1460s.
59. William Pitt, the Elder, made the speech in the House of Commons in 1759.
60. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau was accused of writing obscene and slanderous verses. He defended himself in a 1712 edition of his works. Voltaire’s mock-heroic epic poem La Pucelle (‘The Virgin’) plays on the theme of Joan of Arc’s virginity and its preservation.
61. Montaigne, Essays, book III, chapter 5. The Latin quotation is from Martial’s epigrams, book I, no. 4, l. 8, and means, ‘Our page is licentious, but our life pure.’
62. Bacbuc is the name given to the ‘sacred bottle’ in Rabelais. The following pages are very much a celebration of the Rabelaisian tradition as Diderot seems to have understood it. The consultation of the bottle is to be found in the Cinquième livre, chapter XLV.
63. The same as ventriloquist, i.e. stomach-speaker.
64. The authors that Diderot lists here share – by reputation, at least – a more or less philosophical tendency to epicureanism.
65. The Pomme de Pin was a well-known meeting-place of poets in the seventeenth century, frequented in particular by Chapelle, Molière and La Fontaine. The Temple was the meeting-place of poets such as La Fare and Chaulieu, who established a prevailing tone of easy hedonism.
66. Editors and annotators of classical authors.
67. The clearest indication that Jacques’ master is a nobleman. With a few local exceptions, the nobility could not engage in work or trade personally.
68. In contrast to the simple promissory note, the bill of exchange was a commercial transaction, and therefore made one liable to more stringent prosecution and penalties if one failed to honour it on the due date.
69. Madame Riccoboni was particularly noted for her success with the epistolary novel, which was very popular in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
70. Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (1579–1644), historian and papal nuncio in France.
71. That is, in vino veritas – ‘in the wine is truth’. Charles Collé was a successful song-writer and comic author. This play was first staged in 1747.
72. La Fontaine, Fables, book IX, 4. Garo asks why God didn’t give the mighty oak a fruit of appropriate size, such as the pumpkin. While he takes a nap under an oak, an acorn falls on his nose, prompting Garo to the conclusion that, after all, God organizes things for the best.
73. The reference is to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in his Emile (book II), condemns La Fontaine’s fables as unsuitable for children.
74. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, ll. 85–6. The quotation should read Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre/lussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus (‘He placed man’s countenance on top of his body, and enjoined him to look at the sky and to raise his face to the stars’).
75. Carmelite who published a series of letters during the 1730s in which he sought to prove that the miracles that the Jansenists claimed were occurring in their community might be of diabolical inspiration.
76. It is not clear why Jacques’ master should be taken to what was primarily a debtors’ prison.
77. Le Compère Mathieu (1766–73) was a bawdy and picaresque novel by an ex-priest called Dulaurens.
78. Brigand who developed an almost legendary reputation. He died in 1755.
s on Archive.
Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master Page 32
