CHAPTER VI.  SOCIAL LIFE (1759-1770).

          Diderot’s relations with Madame Voland
          His letters to her
          His Regrets on My Old Dressing-gown
          Domestic discomfort
          His indomitable industry
          Life at Grandval
          Meditations on human existence
          Interest in the casuistry of human feeling
          Various sayings
          A point in rhetoric
          Holbach’s impressions of England
          Two cases of conscience
          A story of human wickedness
          Method and Genius:  an Apologue
          Conversation
          Annihilation
          Characteristic of the century
          Diderot’s inexhaustible friendliness
          The Abbe Monnier
          Mademoiselle Jodin
          Landois
          Rousseau
          Grimm
          Diderot’s money affairs
          Succour rendered by Catherine of Russia
          French booksellers in the eighteenth century
          Dialogue between Diderot and D’Alembert
          English opinion on Diderot’s circle

CHAPTER VII.  THE STAGE.

          In what sense Diderot the greatest genius of the century
          Mark of his theory of the drama
          Diderot’s influence on Lessing
          His play, The Natural Son (1757)
          Its quality illustrated
          His sense of the importance of pantomime
          The dialogues appended to The Natural Son
          His second play, The Father of the Family (1758)
          One radical error of his dramatic doctrine
          Modest opinion of his own experiments
          His admiration for Terence
          Diderot translates Moore’s Gamester
          On Shakespeare
          The Paradox on the Player
          Account of Garrick
          On the truth of the stage
          His condemnation of the French classic stage
          The foundations of dramatic art
          Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama
          No Diderotian school
          Why the Encyclopaedists could not replace the classic
              drama
          The great drama of the eighteenth century

CHAPTER VIII.  “RAMEAU’S NEPHEW.”

The mood that inspired this composition
History of the text
Various accounts of the design of Rameau’s Nephew
Juvenal’s Parasite
Lucian
Diderot’s picture of his original
Not without imaginative strokes
More than a literary diversion
Sarcasms on Palissot
The musical controversy

DIDEROT.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY.