Thirteen years afterwards an edition of Diderot’s works appeared in Paris (Belin’s edition of 1818), but the editors were obliged to content themselves, for Rameau’s Nephew, with an analysis of Goethe’s translation.  In 1821 a lively sensation was produced by the publication of what professed to be the original text of the missing dialogue.  It was really a retranslation into French from Goethe.  The fraud was not discovered for some time, until in 1823 Briere announced for his edition of Diderot’s works a reprint from a genuine original.  This original he had procured from Madame de Vandeul, Diderot’s daughter, who still survived.  She described it as a copy made in 1760 under the author’s own eyes, and this may have been the case, though, if so, it must, from some of the references, have been revised after 1773.  The two young men who had tried to palm off their retranslation from Goethe as Diderot’s own text, at once had the effrontery to accuse Briere and Diderot’s daughter of repeating their own fraud.  A vivacious dispute followed between the indignant publisher and his impudent detractors.  At length Briere appealed to the great Jove of Weimar.  Goethe expressed his conviction that Briere’s text was the genuine text of the original, and this was held to settle the question.  Yet Goethe’s voucher for its correspondence with the copy handed to him by Schiller was not really decisive evidence.  He admits that he executed the translation very rapidly, and had no time to compare it closely with the French.  An identification nearly twenty years afterwards of verbal resemblances and minute references, in a work that had been only a short time in his hands, cannot be counted testimony of the highest kind.  We have thus the extraordinary circumstance that for a great number of years, down almost to the present decade, the text of the one masterpiece of a famous man who died so recently as 1784 rested on a single manuscript, and that a manuscript of disputed authenticity.[295]

Critics differ extremely in their answers to the question of the subject or object of Diderot’s singular “farce-tragedy.”  One declares it to be merely a satirical picture of contemporary manners.  Another insists that it is meant to be an ironical reductio ad absurdum of the theory of self-interest, by exhibiting a concrete example of its working in all its grossness.  A third holds that it was composed by way of rejoinder to Palissot’s comedy (Les Philosophes), 1760, which had brought the chiefs of the rationalistic school upon the stage, and presented them as enemies of the human race.  A fourth suspects that the personal and dramatic portions are no more than a setting for the discussion of the comparative merits of the French and Italian schools of music.  The true answer is that the dialogue is all of these things, because it is none of them.  It is neither more nor less than the living picture and account of an original, drawn by a man of genius who was accustomed to observe human nature and society with a free unblinking vision, and to meditate upon them deeply and searchingly.