Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

And yet, my dear Denis Diderot, I think you already came up against that overlapping at the time of The Nun, and that’s why your story made you cry. One of your cherished “strumpet thoughts” must have come over you: that the deadly excesses of religion, like its deliciously sensual enslavements, don’t come out of nowhere, and they don’t come from the people who use them to justify their liberticidal power. Their egregiousness amplifies and exploits the “clash” inherent in the “natural inclinations” of the human beast, in whom nature chafes with culture — because those two, nature and culture, are always yoked together, however awkwardly, in the speaking animal.

Such is my hypothesis, justified to my mind by the Nephew. Now, if you’ll permit me, I will carry it forward.

Was the end of your novel really lost, as some witnesses allege? Or did you condense the end of the story into a sketchy outline because, overcome by emotion on the heels of a mocking laugh, you found yourself simply unable to finish? “What ails you? What a state you are in!” exclaimed Monsieur d’Alainville, a friend of Grimm’s and yours, when he found you plunged in grief, your face wet with tears. “What ails me?” you replied. “I am undone by a tale I’m telling myself.”⁸ This “tale” you were “telling yourself” would have no conclusion. The end of the Enlightenment went awry with the Terror. Today’s ending seems interminable, and no less problematic.

PERSIFLAGE: FAITH OR WRITING?

And yet it all started off as a farce. That year, 1758, the charming marquis of Croismare was sorely missed by his friends. You had met the gentleman at the salon of Madame d’Épinay. He was a paragon of lively good humor, “devoted to numberless pleasures in succession,” as your friend Grimm described him. One day he decides to move for a time to his Normandy estate, where his affairs require attention. But he fails to return, having caught a serious case of religion! It was then that you, Denis Diderot, hatched the idea (with the help of some co-conspirators, including Grimm) of an amusing prank, otherwise known as a wicked, perfidious piece of jiggery-pokery: to write to the marquis of Croismare some letters purporting to be from a genuine nun of Longchamp, Marguerite Delamarre. This lady had gone to court to have her vows annulled, claiming she had been forced into the nunnery by her parents. The marquis, although he did not know the plaintiff personally, had tried in vain to intercede for her with the councillors of the great chamber of the Paris parlement.

According to the fake letters, the nun had now run away from the convent and was begging for help from the marquis, who fell straight into the trap. The hoaxers split their sides. Eager to succor a nun in distress, the newly reverent Croismare offered her a chambermaid post in his household. This forced you to contrive the death of the supposed heroine of the correspondence, so as to relieve your friend without letting the deception be known. Soon afterward you decided to assemble the letters into a narrative, revised in 1780, but still unpublished: private copies circulated from hand to hand. The joke came to light, and Monsieur de Croismare took it with great good humor. The text did not appear as a novel until 1796, twelve years after your death. There was a general consensus to forget about the persiflage of its origins, but this stratagem nonetheless forms the backdrop to the drama (“a tale I’m telling myself”) and confers an elusive dash of unreality and indeterminacy to the tragedy it recounts. A very French way, isn’t it, of tackling the secrets of religion, not to say the mystery of God, at the same time as attacking head-on the evils of superstition!

On rereading, I find myself thinking that you wept over the novel you were attempting to synthesize from your prank, not only out of compassion for the unhappy victims of the “folly of the cross,” as you call it in your role as encyclopedist and man of the Enlightenment, but also because the fine novelist you are was so stricken by the transference of your feelings upon those of your heroine Marie-Suzanne Simonin that, parallel to your indignation before her ordeals at the hands of religion, you succumbed to the blessings — sorry, the snares — of this magical thing, faith. Here are the words you put into her mouth:

It was then that I came to feel that Christianity was superior to all the other religions in the world. What profound wisdom there was in what benighted philosophy calls the folly of the cross! In the state I was in, how would the image of a happy and glorious lawgiver have helped me? I saw that innocent man, his side pierced, his head crowned with thorns, his hands and feet pierced with nails, and dying in agony, and I said to myself: “This is my God, and yet I dare to feel sorry for myself!”…I clung to this idea and felt a renewed sense of consolation in my heart.⁹