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The Marquise of Claye and the Count of Saint-Alban

Denis Diderot

出版	Marchen Press, 2024-05-09
主題	Philosophy / Metaphysics
ISBN	39898873519783989887350
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=3NHeEAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook	SAMPLE

註釋

Written in the mid-1740s (though unpublished until long after Diderot’s death), The Marquise of Claye and the Count of Saint-Alban is a brief dialogue that offers a revealing glimpse into the young Diderot’s literary experiments. Set in an elegant boudoir, this conversational piece revolves around a worldly Marquise and a fervent young Count who has fallen passionately in love with her. Historically, the dialogue appears to have been drafted around 1747, when Diderot was a struggling man of letters in Paris testing the waters of fiction. It remained in manuscript form, known only to a few friends, and was only rediscovered and published posthumously in the 19th century – an intriguing fact that explains its relative obscurity. Biographically, one can imagine Diderot drawing on his observations of high society salons (which he was beginning to penetrate) and perhaps on his own complicated amorous entanglements. The piece, though short, is rich in its evocation of the tensions between personal desire and social decorum, reflecting the Enlightenment’s growing preoccupation with individual sentiment versus social obligation. This edition contains a new Afterword by the translator, a short biography, a glossary of Philosophical Terms used by Diderot, a chronology of his core life and works, and a summary index of all of Diderot's works. With a clean, modern translation of Diderot's Enlightenment-era French, this edition brings Diderot's thoughts directly into the modern intellectual sphere, tracing the intellectual forces which swept along Diderot and impacted today's secular sphere. The dialog explores the conflict between love and duty. The Marquise, a married aristocrat, is portrayed as intelligent and sympathetic but bound by honor and appearances, while Saint-Alban embodies above all youthful sincerity and the romantic ideal of love. Their exchange touches on philosophical ideas about happiness and virtue: Can true passion be morally upright when it transgresses social norms? Diderot offers no easy answers; instead, through natural, witty dialogue, he reveals the nuanced psychological states of his characters. There is an undercurrent of criticism of the constraints placed on women of rank - the Marquise wistfully acknowledges her feelings yet upholds her obligations, suggesting a quiet indictment of a social system that thwarts authentic emotion. Stylistically, the play is refined and sincere, lacking the overt irony of Diderot's later works but already showing his gift for conversational realism. In the dialogue, the Count of Saint-Alban visits the Marquise in her chambers, seeking to avow his ardent love and to gauge if she returns it. The Marquise, who is married and socially his superior, responds with a blend of warmth, regret, and measured firmness. A central theme is moral duty versus emotional fulfillment. The Marquise clearly has affection for Saint-Alban—her lines show tenderness and the pain of renunciation—but she constantly invokes her duties: to her absent husband, to her own reputation, and to the Count’s future (implying that an affair could damage him as well). Diderot uses this scenario to examine the plight of a woman in a constrained role: she is sympathetic to the young man’s feelings (and indeed shares them to an extent), but she has internalized the expectations of her rank. The Count, on his side, represents youthful romantic idealism. He sees only the purity of his love and cannot fathom why convention should thwart something so true. This clash gives rise to a gentle dialectic: she articulates the reasons of society and conscience, he the reasons of the heart. Philosophically, the conversation aligns with Enlightenment debates on marriage and personal happiness. Diderot himself, and contemporaries like Rousseau, often questioned the practice of arranged or loveless marriages that cause misery. Here, the Marquise’s marriage seems not hateful but is clearly devoid of the passionate connection she and Saint-Alban share. Yet she is unwilling to break her word or betray her spouse. In that sense, she embodies an Enlightenment ideal of virtue (personal integrity, honor) while also eliciting pathos for the sacrifice entailed. An interesting aspect is the absence of a clear villain: her husband is offstage and not characterized, and the impediment is not his cruelty but societal law and conscience. Thus, Diderot frames the conflict as a tragic inevitability rather than a solvable problem—this is more in line with classical French drama’s resignation than with the more revolutionary ideas he’d later support (like divorce or marital freedom). It’s as if in this youthful piece, Diderot acknowledges the problem but hasn’t yet imagined a remedy beyond personal nobility. The Marquise’s lines at moments echo real moral anguish: “I will suffer, perhaps more than you know, but I must not succumb.” Her gentle rejection is as much self-denial as denial of him. Themes of renunciation and the high cost of virtue run through the dialogue, prefiguring the kind of emotional sacrifice scenes that would become common in late 18th-century sentimental literature. The dialogue resolves with an implicit understanding: Saint-Alban must leave, and they will not meet in such a compromising situation again. She urges him to seek happiness elsewhere and not ruin them both. The farewell is poignant, marked by unspoken mutual love and the sadness of “what if.” Stylistically, La Marquise de Claye et Saint-Alban is elegant, concise, and devoid of narrator intrusion. It feels like a slice from a play: one can imagine two actors on a candlelit stage delivering these lines with measured sorrow. The language is polite and circumspect (no overt sexuality or scandalous detail is mentioned), which in a way heightens the emotional tension; all the ardor is present, but it’s sublimated into respectful phrases and teary eyes implied between the lines. This restraint itself is a commentary on the setting: passion in a gilded cage. In sum, the dialogue explores how a rational, virtuous mind grapples with the yearnings of the heart. The Marquise emerges as a quietly heroic figure: she upholds her duties at great personal cost, a decision the text invites us to both admire and lament. Saint-Alban, in turn, learns a painful lesson about the real world’s limits upon love. Unlike a didactic fable with a clear moral, this piece ends in ambiguity of feeling—the right choice has been made, but it does not bring joy. That nuance is very much Diderotian: showing life in its complexity rather than delivering a neat verdict. As a back-of-the-book description might conclude, The Marquise of Claye and the Count of Saint-Alban offers a refined, touching portrait of two souls at cross-purposes with their society. It places historical codes of honor in dialogue with personal truth, yielding a subtle critique of those codes even as it respects the characters’ sincerity in following them. This early work thus not only reflects Diderot’s deep understanding of human emotion but also foreshadows the empathetic approach to women’s inner lives that he would later employ in works like The Nun.