“Rameau is one of the most eccentric figures in the country, where God has not made them lacking.  He is a mixture of elevation and lowness, of good sense and madness; the notions of good and bad must be mixed up together in strange confusion in his head, for he shows the good qualities that nature has bestowed on him without any ostentation, and the bad ones without the smallest shame.  For the rest, he is endowed with a vigorous frame, a particular warmth of imagination, and an uncommon strength of lungs.  If you ever meet him, unless you happen to be arrested by his originality, you will either stuff your fingers into your ears or else take to your heels.  Heavens, what a monstrous pipe!  Nothing is so little like him as himself.  One time he is lean and wan, like a patient in the last stage of consumption:  you could count his teeth through his cheeks; you would say he must have passed some days without tasting a morsel, or that he is fresh from La Trappe.  A month after, he is stout and sleek as if he had been sitting all the time at the board of a financier, or had been shut up in a Bernardine monastery.  To-day in dirty linen, his clothes torn and patched, with barely a shoe to his foot, he steals along with a bent head; one is tempted to hail him and toss him a shilling.  To-morrow, all powdered, curled, in a good coat, he marches about with head erect and open mien, and you would almost take him for a decent worthy creature.  He lives from day to day, from hand to mouth, downcast or sad, just as things may go.  His first care of a morning when he gets up is to know where he will dine; after dinner, he begins to think where he may pick up a supper.  Night brings disquiets of its own.  Either he climbs to a shabby garret he has, unless the landlady, weary of waiting for her rent, has taken the key away from him; or else he shrinks to some tavern on the outskirts of the town, where he waits for daybreak over a crust of bread and a mug of beer.  When he has not threepence in his pocket, as sometimes happens, he has recourse either to a hackney-carriage belonging to a friend, or to a coachman of some man of quality, who gives him a bed on the straw beside the horses.  In the morning he still has bits of the mattress in his hair.  If the weather is mild, he measures the Champs Elysees all night long.  With the day he reappears in the town, dressed over night for the morrow, and from the morrow sometimes dressed for the rest of the week.”

Diderot is accosted by this curious being one afternoon on a bench in front of the Cafe de la Regence in the Palais Royal.  They proceed in the thoroughly natural and easy manner of interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue.  It is not too much to say that Rameau’s Nephew is the most effective and masterly use of that form of discussion since Plato.  Diderot’s vein of realism is doubtless in strong contrast with Plato’s poetic and idealising touch.  Yet imaginative strokes are not wanting to soften the repulsive theme, and to bring the sordid and the foul within the sphere of art.  For an example.  “Time has passed,” says Rameau, “and that is always so much gained.”