This is not a Story

Translated from Project Gutenberg´s French edition, which can be found here:
www.gutenberg.org/etext/28602
This Is Not a Story (written around 1772-published in 1798)
Original French title: Ceci n'est pas un conte
By Denis Diderot
Translation into English by Peter Phalen
Copyright (2010) by Peter Phalen This work is licensed for non-commecial use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
This story is found in Grimm´s Correspondence, dated April 1773, but that version is incomplete. The history of Tanié and la Reymer is missing, as is the end of the history of Mademoiselle de La Chaux.
This Is Not A Story
When one tells a story it is for a listener; and however short the story is, it is highly unlikely that the teller is not occasionally interrupted by his audience. So I have introduced into the narration that will be read, and which is not a story, or which is a bad one if you have doubts about that, a character that might approximate the role of the reader; and I begin.

And you conclude right there?