DIDEROT (Denis). LaReligieuse. ÀParis, chez Buisson, an cinq - Lot 39

Lot 39
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DIDEROT (Denis). LaReligieuse. ÀParis, chez Buisson, an cinq - Lot 39
DIDEROT (Denis). LaReligieuse. ÀParis, chez Buisson, an cinquième de la République [1796-1797]. In-8, (4 of which the last blank)-411-(one blank)pp. half brown marbled basane, smooth spine decorated with lemon and black title-pieces, edges formerly marbled; binding a little rubbed, scattered freckles, a few stains, marginal loss to one leaf (modern binding). First edition. A literary game and a militant work. Denis Diderot and his circle of intimates, saddened by the departure of the Marquis de Croismare to his lands in 1758, decided to play on his spirit of generosity to get him to return to Paris. Shortly before, the Marquis had attempted to have the vows of a young girl confined against her will revoked, so Denis Diderot and his friends decided to send her a false letter declaring that she had escaped and appealing to him for help. Correspondence ensued between the fake nun and the real Marquis, and Diderot, to lend credence to his deception, undertook to write a long autobiographical letter in which the nun gave details of her life in the convent. But when the Marquis offered to welcome the young girl into his home, Diderot cut him short by sending a final, false letter claiming to come from a third party, announcing the nun's death. In 1770, Friedrich-Melchior Grimm published a personal account of this mystification, together with the text of the letters exchanged, in the periodical Correspondance littéraire. In 1780, Jakob-Heinrich Meister commissioned Denis Diderot to write a text for the Correspondance littéraire. Diderot took his 1758 text and turned it into the present novel. However, it was not until 1796 that the first edition of LaReligieuse appeared in bookshops. The work appears both as a denunciation of convents, where sadism and extremism could flourish, and as a complex play on reality and fiction: a militant novel of the Enlightenment and a "new novel" avant la lettre, which describes its own composition. LaReligieuse was adapted for the cinema by Jacques Rivette, and its screening provoked a lively controversy not unlike that generated by the book's publication in 1796.
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