It was thus that Mademoiselle de La Chaux twice missed the opportunity to pull herself from poverty.
She later moved to the outskirts of the city, and I entirely lost track of her. From what I have learned of the remainder of her life, she had become nothing but a fabric of grief, infirmity and misery. The doors of her family were obstinately closed to her. In vain she solicited the intercession of the saintly folk that had persecuted her with so much zeal.
—According to custom.
—The doctor did not abandon her. She died on straw, in an attic, while the little tiger on Hyacinthe street, the only lover that she had had, practiced medicine in Montpellier or Toulouse, and in the greatest comfort enjoyed his well-deserved reputation as a clever man, and his usurped reputation as a decent man.
—But this is still more or less according to custom. If there is a good and honest Tanié, Providence sends him to a Reymer. If there is a good and honest La Chaux, she will come to be shared by a Gardeil[8], so that everything happens for the best.
One might answer that it is rash to make so definitive a pronouncement on the character of a man based on a single act; that a rule so severe would reduce the number of good men on earth to less than the Christian Gospel admits as elect in heaven; that one can be fickle in love, even claim little devotion to women without being deprived of honor or probity; that one is in control neither of suppressing a passion that flares up, nor of prolonging one that is ending; that there are already enough men in the streets and houses that are fully worthy of the name scoundrel without inventing imaginary crimes that multiply them to infinity. One might ask whether I have not betrayed, or deceived, or abandoned a woman without mentioning it. If I desired to respond to these questions my answers would not linger without retort, and it would be a dispute that would last till judgment day. But lay hands on your conscience, and tell me, you, Sir Apologist of the Unfaithful and the Deceivers, if you would take the doctor from Toulouse as your friend?… You hesitate? Everything is said, and I hereupon ask God to take under His holy protection every woman to whom it will take your fancy to pay your respects.
ENDNOTES
[Transcriber´s note: The notations (N.) and (BR.) designate footnotes taken from the Naigeon and Brière editions, respectively. The endnotes by Assézat are unmarked.]
[1] In 1749, M. de Maurepas, still Secretary of the Navy, wrote Louis XV a report in which he developed a strategy for opening trade relations with the English colonies through inland Canada. This plan was thereafter adopted, and Maurepas saw it executed before his death. (BR.)
[2] This word alone would suffice to make the reader lose all confidence in the account that follows it, and yet it is literally true. Diderot adds nothing either to the events or to the temperaments of the characters he introduces. Mademoiselle de La Chaux´s passion for Gardeil, the monstrous ingratitude of her lover, the details of her meeting with him, of their conversation in Diderot´s presence, who had accompanied her to the house of this ferocious beast. The hopelessness touching this betrayed woman, abandoned by him for which she had sacrificed her sleep, her fortune, her reputation, her health, and even the charms by which she seduced him: all this is of the greatest exactness. As Diderot knew the actors in this drama particularly well, for the facts he had been witness to or the friendship that had entrusted him with them were still recent when he resolved to record them, his imagination had not had the time to alter them by adding or subtracting some circumstance to produce a greater effect. And here again is one of the fairly rare accounts of his life, where he says only what has seen, and has seen only what was.