t unjust to suppose that the horrible
picture of the depraved abbess has had some share in attracting a
public.

It is thoroughly characteristic of Diderot's dreamy, heedless humour,
and of the sincerity both of his interest in his work for its own sake,
and of his indifference to the popular voice, that he should have
allowed this, like so many other pieces, to lie in his drawer, or at
most to circulate clandestinely among three or four of his more
intimate friends. It was written about 1760, and ingenious historians
have made of it a signal for the great crusade against the Church. In
truth, as we have seen, it was a strictly private performance, and could
be no signal for a public movement. _La Religieuse_ was undoubtedly an
expression of the strong feeling of the Encyclopaedic school about
celibacy, renunciation of the world, and the burial of men and women
alive in the cloister.

The circumstances under which the story was written are worthy of a word
or two. Among the friends of Madame d'Epinay, Grimm, and Diderot was a
certain Marquis de Croismare. He had deserted the circle, and retired to
his estates in Normandy. It occurred to one of them that it would be a
pleasant stratagem for recalling him to Paris, to invent a personage who
should be shut up in a convent against her will, and then to make this
personage appeal to the well-known courage and generosity of the Marquis
de Croismare to rescue her. A previous adventure of the Marquis
suggested the fiction, and made its success the more probable. Diderot
composed the letters of the imaginary nun, and the conspirators had the
satisfaction of making merry at supper over the letters which the loyal
and unsuspecting Marquis sent in reply. At length the Marquis's interest
became so eager that they resolved that the best way of ending his
torment was to make the nun die. When the Marquis de Croismare returned
to Paris, the plot was confessed, the victim of the mystification
laughed at the joke, and the friendship of the party seemed to be
strengthened by their common sorrow for the woes of the dead sister. But
Diderot had been taken in his own trap. His imagination, which he had
set to work in jest, was caught by the figure and the situation. One day
while he was busy about the tale, a friend paid him a visit, and found
him plunged in grief and his face bathed in tears. "What in the world
can be the matter with you?" cried the friend. "What the matter?"
answered Did