LA RELIGIEUSE 1760-1780

Abstract

As with so many of Diderot's works, the genesis and subsequent development of La Religieuse are shrouded in mystery. How did Diderot come to write it? When, and by what stages, did the novel achieve the form in which we now have it? Available information is scanty and often difficult to interpret. A lively anecdote related by Grimm in the Correspondance litteraire; a slightly revised version of the same anecdote by Diderot, usually printed with the novel itself as a Prejace-annexe; a few scattered and laconic references in private letters. mostly undated; and certain pieces of internal evidence, sometimes conflicting, to be gleaned from the manuscripts in the Collection Vandeul-this is all the information that we have on the subject. Using material from the first two sources, Professor Dieckmann and Professor May have provided convincing answers to some of the questions, but obscurities still remain. How extensive, for example, was the first draft of La Religieuse, begun apparently as the direct outcome of a practical joke played on one of Diderot's friends in the early months of 1760? How radical was the 1780 revision? Was there only one such revision? The manuscripts, as might be expected, furnish some solutions to these· problems, but still leave room for tantalizing hypotheses. According to Grimm's anecdote the novel was the accidental result of a practical joke that he, Grimm himself and 'deux ou trois autres bandits de cette trempe'l played on the Marquis de Croismare. Grimm's account of the hoax, published in the Correspondance litteraire in 1770, ten years after the events it related were supposed to have taken place, included a series of letters purporting to have been exchanged between the jokers and their victim. Diderot was later to revise both Grimm's account and the accompanying letters.2 The substance of the mystification was as follows. Three years earlier, a nun from Longchamp appealed against her vows. (The history of this nun has been successfully reconstructed by Professor May in his Diderot et la Religieuse.3) Without knowing anything of the facts of the case, and according to Grimm ignorant of the exact name of the nun concerned, the Marquis de Croismare: