Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free Page B

of the great French composer Jean-PhilippeRameau. Yet ‘Him’ is not of course presented as a real-life portrait of Rameau: to take only the most glaring example, ‘Him’ in the dialogue defends the view (which is also Rousseau’s) that the Italian language is more suited to music than French, whereas the (real) J.-F. Rameau maintained the opposite view. Other real-life characters, like the Abbé Galiani, have also left their mark on the character of ‘Him’. To maintain, as some critics have done, that ‘Him’ is a parodic or stylized portrait of Rousseau is misleading and unhelpful. And for all that the Nephew is an extraordinary literary creation based on a real person, he is also an example of a specific contemporary type, the Grub Street hack, memorably celebrated in Dr Johnson’s
Life of Richard Savage
(1744). The number of books printed, and so the number of individuals who could style themselves writers, grew enormously in the eighteenth century, and Robert Darnton has contrasted the High Enlightenment of the philosophes (Voltaire, Diderot, and the like) with the low life of the scribblers who scraped a living with journalism or other forms of hack writing. 4 The Nephew thus represents a specific phenomenon of the contemporary literary scene. Other writers of the period create such characters—Marivaux’s
The Indigent Philosopher (L’Indigent philosophe
, 1727), Voltaire’s
The Poor Devil (Le Pauvre diable
, 1760)—though none rival the exuberance of Diderot’s creation.
    The setting of the dialogue is also interesting. In earlier French dialogues the exchanges generally took place in a stylized and closed setting, either outside in an elegant (and conveniently empty) park, or inside in a study, where there was no chance of disturbance. In such cases, the abstract sense of place was entirely fitting for the equally abstract exchange of ideas: the whole intention was to transcend the everyday. Diderot’s purpose is radically different: he sets his dialogue in a café, and not just any café, but the Café de la Régence, in the Place du Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, and a favourite haunt of Diderot himself. TheNarrator explains in the opening lines that he likes to walk in the Palais-Royal gardens around five in the afternoon, and that he takes refuge in the café when it is cold or wet. His picture of the chess-players seated in the café describes a reality of mid-eighteenth-century Paris. Then, at the end of the dialogue, ‘Him’ leaves to attend the Opéra, where performances began in that period at six. The building—it had been Molière’s theatre until his death, when it was taken over by Lully—was situated just opposite the Café de la Régence, and reached down a narrow street from the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Thus the entire dialogue is played out in a precisely defined part of the city (now occupied by the Comédie-Française and the Place du Palais-Royal), and to that extent we may say that the setting is ‘realistic’ in a way unprecedented in a philosophical dialogue.
    But what is noteworthy here is not so much the ‘realism’ of this setting as its rich symbolic significance. Already in the eighteenth century the café was associated with philosophical and literary debate and dispute, for example in Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters
(letter 36), and it was no coincidence that the most influential periodical of the Italian Enlightenment, founded by the Verri brothers in 1764, was called
The Café (Il Caffé
). Much recent work on the Enlightenment has been inspired by Habermas’s notion of public space and his suggestion that Enlightenment discourse was facilitated by the emergence of what he termed the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. 5 The café, like the inn or the Masonic lodge, fostered a new form of sociability, and, in conjunction with the newspapers and brochures made possible by the burgeoning print culture, provided forums for the emergence of public opinion.