This is not a Story

by Denis Diderot

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.

M. A.-A. Barbier (Dictionary of the Anonymous) suggested that Diderot´s memory must have failed him when he attributed translations of "Hume´s First Essays on Metaphysics" [p. 321] and the Essays on Human Understanding [p. 328] to Mademoiselle de La Chaux. But this was certainly not the case. Diderot was only giving the works of Hume as translated by Mademoiselle de La Chaux a more general title. The Political Discourses make up the second part of the Essays. Mademoiselle de La Chaux wrote the first translation of this part (Of Commerce; Of Luxury; Of Money, Amsterdam, 1752, 1753, in-12; Paris and Lyon, in-12). It includes only seven of Hume´s seventeen discourses along with some commentary by the translator. Abbot Le Blanc and later Mauvillon did not publish their versions of the same piece until 1754. Mademoiselle de La Chaux´s translation of Hume´s Writings on Economics was included in the XVth tome of the Collections from the Leading Economists. She died in 1755.

This Is Not A Story