Diderot goes to work with Rameau in some sort and to a certain extent as Shakespeare went to work with Falstaff.  He is the artist, reproducing with the variety and perfection of art a whimsical figure that struck his fancy and stirred the creative impulse.  Ethics, aesthetics, manners, satire, are all indeed to be found in the dialogue, but they are only there as incident to the central figure of the sketch, the prodigy of parasites.  Diderot had no special fondness for these originals.  Yet he had a keen and just sense of their interest.  “Their character stands out from the rest of the world, it breaks that tiresome uniformity which our bringing up, our social conventions, and our arbitrary fashions have introduced.  If one of them makes his appearance in a company, he is like leaven, fermenting and restoring to each person present a portion of his natural individuality.  He stirs people up, moves them, provokes to praise or blame:  he is a means of bringing out reality; gives honest people a chance of showing what they are made of, and unmasks the rogues."[296]

Hearing that the subject of Diderot’s dialogue is the Parasite, the scholar will naturally think of that savage satire in which Juvenal rehearses the thousand humiliations that Virro inflicts on Trebius:  how the wretched follower has to drink fiery stuff from broken crockery, while the patron quaffs of the costliest from splendid cups of amber and precious stones; how the host has fine oil of Venafrum, while the guest munches cabbage that has been steeped in rancid lamp-oil; one plays daintily with mullet and lamprey, while the other has his stomach turned by an eel as long as a snake, and bloated in the foul torrent of the sewers; Virro has apples that might have come from the gardens of the Hesperides, while Trebius gnaws such musty things as are tossed to a performing monkey on the town wall.  But the distance is immeasurable between Juvenal’s scorching truculence and Diderot’s half-ironical, half-serious sufferance.  Juvenal knows that Trebius is a base and abject being; he tells him what he is; and in the process blasts him.  Diderot knows that Rameau too is base and abject, but he is so little willing to rest in the fat and easy paradise of conventions, that he seems to be all the time vaguely wondering in his own mind how far this genius of grossness and paradox and bestial sophism is a pattern of the many, with the mask thrown off.  He seems to be inwardly musing whether it can after all be true, that if one draws aside a fold of the gracious outer robe of conformity, there is no comeliness of life shining underneath, but only this horror of the skeleton and the worm.  He restrains exasperation at the brilliant effrontery of his man, precisely as an anatomist would suppress disgust at a pathological monstrosity, or an astonishing variation in which he hoped to surprise some vital secret.  Rameau is not crudely analysed as a vile type:  he is searched as exemplifying on a prodigious