This is not a Story

Meanwhile the poor woman was coming to a little bit. At these last words she regained enough energy: `what did he say about the loss of his time? I learned four languages to ease his workload, I read a thousand volumes, I wrote, translated, copied day and night, I exhausted myself, wore out my eyes, boiled my blood, I came down with an awful illness from which I may never recover. He does not dare tell you the cause of his displeasure, but you will see.´ At that instant she pulled out her handkerchief, withdrew one of her arms from her dress, bared one of her shoulders, and, showing me an erysipelatus mark, `The reason for his transformation, there it is,´ she said to me, `there it is, there is the effect of those sleepless nights. It came one morning with these rolls of parchment. M. d´Hérouville, he told me, is very anxious to know what is in these, this work has to be done by tomorrow, and it was…´ At that moment we heard someone´s steps coming towards the door. It was a servant announcing M. d´Hérouville´s arrival. Gardeil´s face went pale. I invited Mademoiselle de La Chaux to withdraw and tidy herself up… `No,´ she said. `No. I am staying. I want this disgrace uncovered. I will wait for M. d´Hérouville. I will speak to him.´ `And what good will that do?´ `None,´ she answered me, `you are right.´ `Tomorrow you will regret it. Leave him his evil deeds; it is a revenge worthy of you.´ `But is it worthy of him? Do you not see that this man here is not… Let´s go, monsieur, let us leave now, for I can neither answer for what I would do, nor for what I would say…´ In the blink of an eye Mademoiselle de La Chaux had repaired the disorder this scene had made of her clothes and raced from of Gardeil´s office. I followed and heard the door slam shut behind her. I later learned that someone had given notice to the porter.

I conducted myself to her quarters, where I found Doctor Le Camus waiting for us. The passion that he felt for this young woman differed little from hers for Gardeil. I recounted our visit to him, and while I spoke the signs of his anger, pain, indignation…

– It was not too difficult to see from his face that your failure did not displease him all that much.

– It is true.

– There is man for you. He is no better than that.

– This rupture was followed by a violent sickness, during which time the good, honest, tender and kind doctor gave her such a treatment he would not have reserved for the noblest woman in France. He came three, four times a day. In spite of the peril he slept in her room on a canvas-strap bed. It is fortunate that this was only a disease of the heart.

– In returning to us she drifts away from her memories of others. And then she has a pretext to be troubled without indiscretion or constraint.

– That thought, otherwise just, does not apply to Mademoiselle de La Chaux.

During her recovery we sorted out her schedule. She had more than enough spirit, imagination, taste and knowledge to be admitted into the Académie des Inscriptions. She had listened to us wax metaphysical for so long that the most abstract matters had become familiar to her. Her first literary endeavor was the translation of Hume´s Essays on Human Understanding. I proofread it, and to tell you the truth she had left me with very little to rectify. This translation was printed in Holland and was well received by the public.

My Letter on the Blind and the Dumb appeared at almost the same time. She raised some very perceptive objections which gave rise to an addition dedicated to her6. I have done worse things than make this addition.

Mademoiselle de La Chaux´s happiness had been somewhat restored. The doctor cooked for us occasionally and these dinners were not too sorrowful. Since Gardeil´s estrangement, Le Camus´ passion had made marvelous strides. One day, at the table during dessert, as he was expressing it with all the honesty, sensitivity and naïveté of a child, she said to him, with a sincerity that pleased me greatly but which will perhaps displease others: `Doctor, it would be impossible to heighten the respect I have for you. Your kindnesses fulfill me, and I would be as gloomy as the monster of Hyacinthe Street were I not steeped in the fiercest gratitude. You tell me of your passion with such grace and sensitivity that I would be, I think, angry if you were to stop. Just the idea of losing your company or of being deprived of your friendship is enough to make me miserable. You are a good man, if there ever was one. Your goodness and sweetness of character is incomparable. I do not believe that a heart can fall into better hands. I appeal to my own from morning till night in your favor, but appeal in vain to that which does not desire it. I am not making any more progress. Meanwhile you will suffer, and so I feel a vicious pain. I do not know anyone more worthy of the happiness that you seek, and I do not know what I would not do to make you happy. Anything is possible, without exception. I mean, doctor, I would… yes, I would go so far as to sleep… so far as to include that. Do you want to sleep with me? You only have to say so. That is all I can do for you. But you want to be loved, and I do not know a way.´

The doctor listened to her, took her by the hand and kissed it, wet it with tears. And I, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry. Mademoiselle de La Chaux knew the doctor well. The next day I said to her, `But Mademoiselle, if the doctor had said the word?´ She answered, `I would have kept my promise, but that would never have happened; my offers were not of the sort that would be accepted by a man like him…´ `Why not? It seems to me that if I were in his position I would have simply hoped that the rest would follow.´ `Yes, but if you were in his position, Mademoiselle de La Chaux would not have made you the same proposition.´

The Hume translation had not made her very much money. The Dutch will print anything provided they do not pay for it.

– Lucky for us. Given all the restrictions we place on thought in our country, if they even once decided to pay the authors they would bring the entire book industry to their doorstep.

– We advised her to write a light read, one that would bring her more profit than respect. She worked for four or five months, at which point she brought me a short historical fiction entitled "The Three Favorites." It had a deftness of style, finesse and earnestness, but – without her having realized it for she was incapable of any malice – it was scattered with a multitude of details applicable to the King´s mistress, the Marquise of Pompadour; and I did not conceal from her the fact that whatever the sacrifice, whether it be in softening or removing these sections, it would be almost impossible for her work to appear without compromising her, and that the unhappiness of spoiling such a good thing would not guarantee her another.

She sensed the truth in my observation and became only more distressed. The good doctor predicted all her needs, but she accepted his charity with all the more reservation, as she felt herself less disposed to the sort of gratitude that he hoped to receive from her. Besides, the doctor7 was not wealthy then, and he was not particularly in a position to become wealthy. From time to time she took her manuscript from its folder and said to me sadly, `Well! There is no way to make anything of this. It will have to remain there.´ I gave her some singular advice: send the work as is, without toning it down or altering it, to Madame de Pompadour herself, with a postscript explaining the delivery. This idea pleased her. She wrote a charming letter on all counts, but most importantly with a tone of sincerity to which it would be impossible to say no. Two or three months passed with no word and she had deemed the attempt fruitless, until a Saint-Louis cross came to her home with a letter from the marquise. The work was given the praise it merited, she was thanked for her sacrifice, a market was acknowledged, no offense was taken, and the author was invited to come to Versailles, where she would find a gracious woman disposed to give the help that depended on her. As he was leaving Mademoiselle de La Chaux´s home the envoy left a roll of fifty louis smoothly on her mantelpiece.

The doctor and I urged her to take advantage of Madame de Pompadour´s good will, but we were working with a girl whose modesty and shyness matched her merit. How to present oneself there in rags? The doctor raised this concern immediately. After clothing there were other excuses, and then still more. The voyage to Versailles was deferred from day to day until it was almost inappropriate to go through with it. It had already been some time since we had spoken to her about it when the same emissary returned with a second letter filled with the kindest reproaches and another bonus offered with the same gentleness as the first. This generous act of Madame de Pompadour has never been discovered. I spoke of it to M. Collin, her confidant and distributor of her secret favors. He had not heard of it, and I like to think that it is not the only one that her tomb contains.

It was thus that Mademoiselle de La Chaux twice missed the opportunity to pull herself from poverty.

She later moved to the outskirts of the city, and I entirely lost track of her. From what I have learned of the remainder of her life, she had become nothing but a fabric of grief, infirmity and misery. The doors of her family were obstinately closed to her. In vain she solicited the intercession of the saintly folk that had persecuted her with so much zeal.

– According to custom.

– The doctor did not abandon her. She died on straw, in an attic, while the little tiger on Hyacinthe street, the only lover that she had had, practiced medicine in Montpellier or Toulouse, and in the greatest comfort enjoyed his well-deserved reputation as a clever man, and his usurped reputation as a decent man.

– But this is still more or less according to custom. If there is a good and honest Tanié, Providence sends him to a Reymer. If there is a good and honest La Chaux, she will come to be shared by a Gardeil8, so that everything happens for the best.

One might answer that it is rash to make so definitive a pronouncement on the character of a man based on a single act; that a rule so severe would reduce the number of good men on earth to less than the Christian Gospel admits as elect in heaven; that one can be fickle in love, even claim little devotion to women without being deprived of honor or probity; that one is in control neither of suppressing a passion that flares up, nor of prolonging one that is ending; that there are already enough men in the streets and houses that are fully worthy of the name scoundrel without inventing imaginary crimes that multiply them to infinity. One might ask whether I have not betrayed, or deceived, or abandoned a woman without mentioning it. If I desired to respond to these questions my answers would not linger without retort, and it would be a dispute that would last till judgment day. But lay hands on your conscience, and tell me, you, Sir Apologist of the Unfaithful and the Deceivers, if you would take the doctor from Toulouse as your friend?.. You hesitate? Everything is said, and I hereupon ask God to take under His holy protection every woman to whom it will take your fancy to pay your respects.

1

In 1749, M. de Maurepas, still Secretary of the Navy, wrote Louis XV a report in which he developed a strategy for opening trade relations with the English colonies through inland Canada. This plan was thereafter adopted, and Maurepas saw it executed before his death. (BR.)

2

This word alone would suffice to make the reader lose all confidence in the account that follows it, and yet it is literally true. Diderot adds nothing either to the events or to the temperaments of the characters he introduces. Mademoiselle de La Chaux´s passion for Gardeil, the monstrous ingratitude of her lover, the details of her meeting with him, of their conversation in Diderot´s presence, who had accompanied her to the house of this ferocious beast. The hopelessness touching this betrayed woman, abandoned by him for which she had sacrificed her sleep, her fortune, her reputation, her health, and even the charms by which she seduced him: all this is of the greatest exactness. As Diderot knew the actors in this drama particularly well, for the facts he had been witness to or the friendship that had entrusted him with them were still recent when he resolved to record them, his imagination had not had the time to alter them by adding or subtracting some circumstance to produce a greater effect. And here again is one of the fairly rare accounts of his life, where he says only what has seen, and has seen only what was.

As for the curious particularities that he recorded from Mademoiselle de La Chaux and that he documented in his writing, I will add only a single fact – that he omitted through forgetfulness and that was worthy of being conserved – that this so tender, so passionate, so interesting by her extreme sensibility and by her misfortunes, above all so worthy of a better fate, had also been friends with D´Alembert and the Abbot de Condillac. She was in a position to hear and assess the works of these two philosophers. She had even given the latter, who´s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge she had read, the very wise advice of returning to his first thoughts, and, if I may use the expression, to begin at the beginning, i.e., the reject with Hobbes the absurd hypothesis of a distinction between two substances in man. I dare say that this very philosophical view, this sole idea of Mademoiselle de La Chaux suggests more breadth, depth and accuracy in her mind that the whole of Condillac´s metaphysics, in which there is in effect a radical and destructive vice that affects the entire system, and yields more or less vague and uncertain results. One sees that Mademoiselle de La Chaux sensed this; and one regrets that Condillac, more docile to the judicious advice of this enlightened woman with uncommon insight, did not follow the route that she pointed him towards. He would not have scattered so many errors over the one he decided upon, and upon which one can only run astray, as happens daily to those that take him as their guide. See, on this philosopher, the preliminary reflections that serve as an introduction to his article, in the METHODICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA, Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, t. II, and what I have again in my Historical and Philosophical Memoires on the life and work of Diderot. (N.)

3

Antoine de Ricouart, count of Hérouville, born in Paris in 1713, is the author of Treatise on the Legions, which carries the name of the marshal of Saxony [4], Paris, 1757. He furnished the authors of the Encyclopédie with some curious dissertations. It was hoped that they be sent to the minister under Louis XV, but an unequal marriage excluded it. He died in 1782. (BR.)

4

Only in the first three editions. The work had been first printed on a copy communicated to the marshal and was found in his papers.

5

Montucla was only thirty years old when he published his History of Mathematics, Paris, 1758. It was reviewed and finished by Lalande, Paris, 1799-1802. (Br.)

6

See t. 1, p. 399.

7

Le Camus (Antoine), who left behind other memories of charity.

We owe to him a large number of works of literature and of medicine. We will here cite only: The Medicine of the Mind, Paris, 1753. Strategy for Wiping Out Smallpox, 1767. Practical Medicine Made Simpler, More Reliable and More Methodical, 1769. Numerous memoirs on different subjects of medicine. Abdéker, or the Art of Conserving Beauty, 1754-1756. Love and Friendship, comedy, 1763. The Pastoral Romance of Daphnis and Chloe, translated from Longus´ Greek by Amyot, with a double translation, Paris, 1757. This new translation by Le Camus is still worth reading after the one just published by M. Courier in Sainte-Pélagie, where he was detained for a work commissioned by the estate of Chambord. Paris, 1821. (BR.)

8

Gardeil died on April 19, 1808, at the age of 82. We have from him a Translation of Hippocrates´ Medical Works, from the Greek text according to the Foës edition, Toulouse, 1801. (Br.) – He Practiced in Montpellier.