Introduction

When a young philosopher sat down in 1748 to write a scandalous, gossipy novel about talking jewels and a bored sultan, he could scarcely have imagined that the same restless mind would one day shoulder the colossal labor of the Encyclopédie and become one of the towering intellects of the European Enlightenment. Yet the book you are about to read—Les Bijoux Indiscrets, here rendered as The Indiscreet Toys—is no embarrassing youthful indiscretion to be quietly forgotten. It is, on the contrary, a sparkling, mischievous, and surprisingly profound work that reveals Denis Diderot at the very beginning of his powers: irreverent, intellectually voracious, alive to the absurdities of human pretense, and utterly delighted by the comic distance between what people say and what they actually want. To open these pages is to step into a world of glittering palaces, whispering courtiers, philosophical debates dressed in the silks of fantasy, and a single, gloriously preposterous premise that allows Diderot to say things about his age—and ours—that could not otherwise be spoken aloud.

The premise itself is the engine of the entire book, and it is worth approaching it with the right spirit. This is an Oriental fantasy in the fashionable eighteenth-century mode, a tale set in an imaginary sultanate called the Congo, ruled by a sovereign named Mangogul who is so afflicted with the ordinary ennui of absolute power that he longs for novelty, amusement, and above all the truth—that rarest of court commodities. A magical ring is procured for him, and this ring possesses an extraordinary property: when its bearer points it at any woman, it compels not her lips but her most intimate part—her “toy,” in the discreet euphemism that gives this translation its title—to speak aloud and confess the truth of her romantic and erotic history. The conceit is bawdy, certainly, and the reader should not pretend otherwise; but it is also a stroke of satirical genius. For what Diderot has invented is a kind of mechanical truth-serum, a device that strips away the elaborate machinery of social performance and forces the unspoken to become spoken. And in doing so, he holds up a mirror to an entire civilization built upon the careful management of appearances.

To understand why this book matters, and why it remains genuinely entertaining nearly three centuries after its composition, it helps to know a little about the man who wrote it and the moment in which he wrote. Denis Diderot was born in 1713 in Langres, the son of a respected master cutler, and he was raised in a household that expected him to enter the Church. He resisted that path with all the energy of a mind too large to be confined by orthodoxy, and after a brilliant but unsettled education he drifted into the precarious life of a man of letters in Paris—translating, tutoring, scribbling, and slowly assembling the convictions that would make him one of the most dangerous thinkers of his century. By the time he composed Les Bijoux Indiscrets, he was in his mid-thirties, married, perpetually short of money, and just beginning the editorial work on the great Encyclopédie that would consume the better part of his life and very nearly land him in prison more than once.

That double identity—the future encyclopedist hidden inside the author of a frivolous erotic romp—is the key to reading this book well. Do not be deceived by the playful surface. Beneath the gossip and the wink-and-nudge comedy of the talking toys, Diderot is conducting a serious and sustained investigation into some of the deepest preoccupations of the Enlightenment: the nature of truth and how we come to know it; the gulf between social convention and natural inclination; the absurdity of dogmatic learning that mistakes jargon for understanding; the hypocrisy of moralists who condemn in public what they pursue in private; and the question of whether human beings can ever be honest, with others or even with themselves. The whole apparatus of the fantasy—the magical ring, the Oriental setting, the comic indecency—functions as a protective disguise, a costume that allows the philosopher to smuggle subversive ideas past the censors and into the minds of his readers.

This was a necessary strategy. In the France of Louis XV, writing was a perilous occupation for anyone with genuinely independent views. The state and the Church maintained an elaborate system of censorship; books that offended religious or political authority could be seized and burned, and their authors imprisoned. Diderot himself would be locked up in the fortress of Vincennes in 1749, the year after this novel appeared, for the heterodox opinions expressed in another work. The Enlightenment writers learned to be cunning. They cloaked their critiques in fables, set their satires in distant or imaginary lands, attributed dangerous thoughts to fictional characters or foreign travelers, and wrapped their philosophy in entertainment so that it might slip past the guardians of public morality. The Indiscreet Toys belongs squarely to this tradition. Its frivolity is partly genuine—Diderot was a man who loved a good joke—but it is also a tactic, a way of speaking truths that the powerful would rather not hear.

The “Oriental” frame deserves a word of explanation, because the modern reader will rightly notice that the Congo of this book bears no resemblance to any real African kingdom, and that its supposedly exotic characters are transparently French courtiers in fancy dress. This was entirely deliberate and instantly recognizable to Diderot’s first audience. The eighteenth century was awash in tales set in vaguely defined “Eastern” realms, a fashion ignited by the enormously popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights and sustained by a steady stream of imitations. Montesquieu had used the device brilliantly in his Persian Letters of 1721, in which two Persian visitors comment with naive astonishment on the customs of Paris, allowing the author to satirize French society under the convenient pretense of describing it through foreign eyes. Diderot adopts the same fiction here. The names are pseudo-exotic, the setting is a transparent fantasy, and everyone understood that “the Congo” was really Versailles, that Sultan Mangogul was a barely disguised commentary on Louis XV, and that the famous favorite at his court was a glance at Madame de Pompadour. The Oriental costume was a kind of open secret, a shared joke between author and reader that fooled no one but provided just enough deniability to make the satire publishable.

The reader of today should approach these elements with a clear historical understanding. The fantasy setting is not an attempt at cultural description but a literary convention, a mask worn for the purposes of satire. What Diderot is really anatomizing is the court of his own king, the salons of his own city, the manners and morals of his own people. When the toys speak, they expose the secret lives of French aristocrats; when the sultan grows bored, he embodies the listless decadence of French royalty; when the courtiers scheme and flatter and betray, they enact the rituals of Versailles. To read the book as anything other than a satire of eighteenth-century France is to miss the point entirely.

What makes The Indiscreet Toys so much fun to read—and it is, genuinely, a delight—is the relentless ingenuity with which Diderot exploits his outrageous premise. Once the magical ring is in the sultan’s possession, the book becomes a series of episodes, each one an experiment, a test, a comic set-piece in which Mangogul points his ring at some woman of the court and waits to hear what her toy will reveal. The results are by turns hilarious, scandalous, and quietly devastating. Women who present themselves to the world as paragons of virtue are exposed as having entertained a parade of lovers; pious matrons turn out to be anything but; the elaborate fictions by which polite society maintains its veneer of respectability collapse one after another under the merciless honesty of the speaking jewels.

There is a deep philosophical joke embedded in this structure, and it rewards reflection. The ring does not make people lie; it makes a part of them tell the truth—a part that, by its nature, cannot dissemble, cannot perform, cannot construct a flattering self-image. Diderot is playing with the eighteenth-century fascination with the body as a kind of honest machine, and with the idea that beneath the elaborate constructions of language and social performance lies a stratum of bare physical fact that cannot be argued away. The mouth lies; the body does not. This is the source of the book’s comedy, but it is also the source of its subversive power. By splitting his characters into a lying upper half and a truthful lower half, Diderot dramatizes the central hypocrisy of his society: the chasm between the self that speaks and the self that acts, between the moral mask and the natural appetite.

And the satire does not confine itself to the bedroom. As the episodes accumulate, Diderot widens his aim to take in a whole gallery of human pretensions. There are wonderful passages mocking the pomposity of physicians and natural philosophers who debate the phenomenon of the talking toys in absurdly learned language, producing rival theories and competing systems and explaining nothing—a savage parody of academic disputation that the editor of the Encyclopédie was uniquely qualified to deliver. There are scenes that puncture religious hypocrisy, that ridicule the vanity of authors and the credulity of audiences, that expose the corruption hidden behind every institution the age held sacred. One of the most celebrated sequences is a thinly veiled allegory of the contemporary quarrel between the partisans of Italian and French music, an inside joke for the cultured Parisian reader. Another is a dream-vision in which the speaker ascends to a temple of philosophy and surveys the ruins of dead systems, a passage of unexpected seriousness that announces Diderot’s true allegiances. The book is constantly shifting register, darting from the salacious to the speculative, from low comedy to high philosophy, in a manner that is characteristic of Diderot throughout his career.

This restlessness, this refusal to stay in one mode, is part of what makes him such a distinctive and modern-feeling writer. He is a digressive author by temperament, forever interrupting his own narrative to insert an essay, a debate, a satirical aside, a flight of fancy. Readers who come to this book expecting a tidy, linear plot will find instead something looser, baggier, and more conversational—a series of brilliant improvisations strung along the thread of the central conceit. This is not a flaw to be excused but a feature to be enjoyed. Diderot wrote the way he thought and talked: associatively, exuberantly, leaping from one idea to the next with the energy of a man who finds everything interesting. The book is best read in this same spirit, as a kind of intellectual conversation with a brilliant, irreverent, endlessly curious companion who happens to be living in eighteenth-century Paris and who has a great many opinions about everything.

It is worth pausing to address the matter of the book’s frankness, because it is real and the reader deserves honesty about it. The Indiscreet Toys is, by the standards of its day and even of ours, a risqué book. Its central premise is erotic, its episodes deal openly with the sexual lives of its characters, and its humor is frequently bawdy. This is not pornography in any meaningful sense—Diderot is far too interested in ideas to linger over titillation for its own sake—but it is unmistakably a work that treats sexuality as a legitimate and even central subject of literature and philosophy. In this it was both shocking and forward-looking. The Enlightenment was, among other things, a movement that sought to liberate human experience from the censorship of religious shame, to examine all aspects of life—including the appetites and pleasures of the body—with the same clear, unembarrassed gaze it turned upon politics and science. Diderot’s willingness to write frankly about desire is part of his larger project of intellectual liberation. He is insisting that the body and its pleasures are not unspeakable, that the truth about human nature includes its physical and erotic dimensions, and that any philosophy or morality that pretends otherwise is built on a lie. The modern reader, encountering these episodes, should understand them in this light: not as gratuitous indecency but as a deliberate philosophical provocation, a refusal to participate in the polite fiction that human beings are anything other than the desiring creatures they actually are.