Translated from Project Gutenberg´s French edition, which can be found here:
www.gutenberg.org/etext/28602
This Is Not a Story(written around 1772-published in 1798)
Original French title: Ceci n'est pas un conte
By Denis Diderot
Translation into English by Peter Phalen
Copyright (2010) by Peter Phalen
This work is licensed for non-commecial use under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
This story is found in Grimm´s Correspondence, dated April 1773, but thatversion is incomplete. The history of Tanié and la Reymer is missing, as isthe end of the history of Mademoiselle de La Chaux.
M. A.-A. Barbier (Dictionary of the Anonymous) suggested that Diderot´smemory must have failed him when he attributed translations of "Hume´s FirstEssays on Metaphysics" [p. 321] and the Essays on Human Understanding [p.328] to Mademoiselle de La Chaux. But this was certainly not the case.Diderot was only giving the works of Hume as translated by Mademoiselle de LaChaux a more general title. The Political Discourses make up the second partof the Essays. Mademoiselle de La Chaux wrote the first translation of thispart (Of Commerce; Of Luxury; Of Money, Amsterdam, 1752, 1753, in-12; Parisand Lyon, in-12). It includes only seven of Hume´s seventeen discourses alongwith some commentary by the translator. Abbot Le Blanc and later Mauvillondid not publish their versions of the same piece until 1754. Mademoiselle deLa Chaux´s translation of Hume´s Writings on Economics was included in theXVth tome of the Collections from the Leading Economists. She died in 1755.
This Is Not A Story
When one tells a story it is for a listener; and however short the story is,it is highly unlikely that the teller is not occasionally interrupted by hisaudience. So I have introduced into the narration that will be read, andwhich is not a story, or which is a bad one if you have doubts about that, acharacter that might approximate the role of the reader; and I begin.
*****
And you conclude right there?
—That a subject this interesting must make us dizzy, be the talk of the townfor a month, be phrased and rephrased until flavorless, produce a thousandarguments, at least twenty leaflets, and around a hundred bits of verse infavor or against. In spite of all the finesse, learning, and pure grit of theauthor, given that his work has not lead to any violence it is mediocre. Verymediocre.
—But it seems to me that we owe him a rather agreeable evening, and thatthis reading has brought…
—What? A litany of worn-out vignettes fired from left and right, saying justone single thing known for all eternity, that man and woman areextraordinarily unfortunate beasts.
—Nevertheless the epidemic has won you over, and you have contributed justlike any other.
—Whether or not it be to one´s taste, it is only good taste to strike thetone given. When meeting company, we customarily tidy up appearances at thedoor of the apartment for whomever we are seeing; we pretend to be funny whenwe are sad; sad, when we would have liked to be funny. We do not want toappear out of place anywhere; so the literary hack politicizes, the politicalpundit talks metaphysics, the metaphysician moralizes, the moralist talksfinance, the financier, letters or logic. Rather than listen or keep quiet,each ramble on about what they are ignorant of, and everyone bores each otherwith silly vanity or politenes