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The Philosopher’s Room: Diderot’s Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/oxartj/kcw014

1741-7287

Katie Scott,

Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought

In her writing and teaching Helen Weston was an advocate for slow, considered study, often returning to the same work, or the same text, to qualify a first impression and extend and develop her interpretation. This essay is inspired by one of her undergraduate courses – Art Criticism from Diderot to Ruskin – and aims at her kind of attentiveness. It is written for her pleasure and in gratitude for her teaching, guidance, generosity, and friendship. *** ‘Why didn’t I keep her? She was made for me; I was made for her. She hugged the line of every fold of my body without hemming me in; I looked a picture, I looked my best. The other one is stiff and heavy and makes a manikin of me.’ 1 So begins Denis Diderot’s short narrative Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre in which the philosophe laments not just the passing of the old, shabby, and familiar dressing gown of the title, replaced by a brand-new one, but also the loss of his old room; the new gown had required a new interior to match it in material grandeur. Diderot’s short tale of woe belongs to the light, occasional, and avowedly inconsequential literature published in court gazettes and city newspapers throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. 2 In a letter written in 1769 to his friend and editor Fréderic-Melchior, Baron von Grimm, the author described the essay as ‘chatty’ ( bavard ), by which he meant familiar, unguarded, and digressive, an informality of style saved from banality, he said, by the inventive playfulness and delight with which it was written, a mood that dresses the text even now. 3 Seemingly neither profound, nor original, indeed one could almost say something of a cliché , this story in which the hero Diderot is apparently suspended between virtue and luxury, oscillating, or better, vacillating, between them, was nevertheless sufficiently topical that, in 1772, four years after its first discreet circulation in Grimm’s manuscript journal The Correspondance Littéraire , 4 an unauthorized edition was printed and published in Germany for a significantly less exclusive readership by Friedrich Dominicus Ring. 5 Three reprintings followed before the end of the decade, and in 1779 the story also appeared in the Journal de lecture , published in France. 6 One of the few of Diderot’s late works to see publication in the author’s lifetime, Regrets has since remained one of the best known and most loved.