"The Lost Letters of Sophie Volland" Reexamined

Abstract

A few years ago, while on sabbatical in Paris to do research for a book on Diderot, I lived in an apartment on the rue de Richelieu, a few blocks from the Comedie Francaise on one side, and the Bibliotheque Nationale on the other. In the evening, I liked to go out on the balcony to look down the length of the rue Therese, with its seventeenthand eighteenth-century buildings, now bulging and sagging with age. At these times, my eye was invariably drawn to a house on the corner of the rue Therese and the rue de Richelieu bearing the name, in large letters, of the locksmith Bricard. From my vantage point, I could see through the windows of the upper stories and observe workers in smocks sitting at long benches, intently constructing the locks found on so many doors throughout France, a scene that evoked for me the interiors of workshops as they are portrayed in the plates of the Encyclopedie. But I could never have imagined what I was soon to learn. Leafing through Arthur Wilson's biography of Diderot one day, I found a photograph of the very house I'd been admiring. Number 39, rue de Richelieu was none other than the house in which Diderot had spent his final months, and had died.1 Around this time I was reading the Lettres t Sophie Volland. As a result, when I stood on the balcony now to gaze at Number 39, I began to pic-