Dream Chaser

Once, the two philosophers were names that made news. "Ye gods!" a nobleman of Paris exclaimed. "Everywhere I go, I hear talk of nobody but this Rousseau and this Diderot . . . People of the lowest sort, people who do not even own their own houses, who live on the fourth floor . . ." Today, except for a few scholars, people talk a good deal less about Diderot than they do of Rousseau. Students who learn of Diderot in college are apt to classify him as one of the great French Encyclopedists, learn too little of his novels, plays and essays. If they remembered him at all it was as a minor beam in France's 18th Century age of enlightenment. Last week, Denis Diderot was having his innings.

The man responsible for the new interest in Diderot had been a fan for most of his life. But even to German-born Herbert Dieckmann, now a professor of Romance languages at St. Louis' Washington University, Diderot the man was still a "fantastic and unbelievable enigma." For one thing, most of his original manuscripts had disappeared.

A Fishy Sound. Dieckmann had a hunch that Diderot had never really destroyed the manuscript of his great philosophical dialogue, D'Alembert's Dream, though one contemporary declared that Diderot had burned it and another said he had torn it up. "The whole thing sounded fishy to me," says Dieckmann.

In 1930 Dieckmann went from Germany to France, told other scholars his theory that the Diderot manuscript was still in existence somewhere. One day a scholar casually remarked that he thought he might have seen the Dream while going through the family papers of a certain Baron Jacques Le Vavasseur, Diderot's direct descendant. Apparently, Diderot's daughter had passed on a whole batch of papers to her descendants. The family had let only two untrained amateurs take a look: it thought the less said about Diderot's escapades and radical ideas the better. Dieckmann got only a curt refusal when he wrote the baron.

In a Castle Closet. Not until last summer, 18 years later, did Dieckmann, now a U.S. citizen, get back to France. This time, he wrote, telephoned and called on the baron. Finally, the baron told him to go out to his castle outside Fecamp: there were some papers there.

Next day, Dieckmann began searching the castle. For eight days he ransacked boxes in a closet of the servants' quarters. Finally, he had emptied the closet--except for a bunch of papers lying loose and uncovered at the back. There, the fourth paper he pulled out proved to be a Diderot manuscript that scholars had never known of before.

This week, at a meeting of scholars in Manhattan, Dieckmann told what else he had found. He had not uncovered the original manuscript of the Dream, but there were plenty of other treasures. He had found letters, notebooks, 31 manuscripts, 19 works never published, an essay by the philosopher Helvetius with Diderot's furious comments in the margins.

The baron had lent them all to Dieckmann, and he had brought them home with him to St. Louis. All in all, to the tiny band of Diderot scholars it was the greatest discovery ever. It would mean a complete new look at the man Dieckmann holds was certainly "on a level with Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu." For students of the 18th Century, Dieckmann's find was beaten only by one other: the discovery of the Boswell Malahide papers (TIME, Nov. 29), which had also turned up forgotten in an ancient castle.

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