The Book Missing from Diderot’s Works

Denis DIDEROT

Jacques le Fataliste et son maître

Name: Denis DIDEROT • [Jacques the Fatalist and His Master] • Jacques le Fataliste et son maître • 1796
Brand: François Buisson
SKU: 75946
Price: 3500 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Denis DIDEROT

[Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]

Chez Buisson|à Paris An Cinquième de la République [1796]|12 x 20.70 cm|relié

€3,500

⬨ 75946

First posthumous edition of Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, published in Paris by François Buisson in 1796 on Holland paper. The text is preceded by À la mémoire de Diderot by Jacques-Henri Meister, a close friend of Diderot and Grimm’s successor as director of the Correspondance littéraire.

Contemporary full mottled brown calf, spine with raised bands and gilt decoration, red morocco lettering-piece and black morocco numbering-piece. Small loss at the lower joint near the foot, some rubbing, surface wear and a patch of leather loss to the upper board, one worn corner; small marginal losses to the outer corner of pp. 247 and 257. The paper is generally fresh.

The present copy was bound in a single volume following the 1772 edition of Diderot’s Œuvres, in six volumes; twenty-four years later, Jacques le Fataliste thus materially completes a collection of the author’s works published long before the novel itself appeared in print.

The text had already had a long history. Begun around 1765, revised and enlarged over nearly twenty years, it first appeared in the Correspondance littéraire between 1778 and 1780, with further additions in 1780 and again in 1786. Meister, who had known the history of the work at close hand, opens the 1796 edition with a tribute to Diderot first published ten years earlier in the same journal.

Before appearing in French, the novel had already begun another life in Germany. Schiller translated the episode of Madame de La Pommeraye for his journal Thalia; Doray de Longrais then translated it back into French under the title Exemple singulier de la vengeance d’une femme. In 1792, Mylius produced the first complete German translation, while another manuscript of the novel, owned by Prince Henry of Prussia, was communicated to the Institut national. By the time Buisson finally published the complete French text in 1796, Jacques le Fataliste had therefore been circulating for years through manuscripts, periodicals and translations.

Its formal freedom owes much to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: interruptions, digressions, a narrative constantly resumed or suspended, and a continual dialogue with the reader. Diderot turns the novel into a work that seems always to hesitate between the story being told and the very act of telling it.

Bound after the 1772 Œuvres, this Jacques le Fataliste takes, retrospectively, the place that had been missing from Diderot’s library; a text long kept outside the book finally joins, in this copy, the body of work to which it seemed destined.