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declared, for example, Abbe Raynal in theCorrespondance litteraire.1 The reason for this unfriendly reception is not far to seek. The novel belongs to a genre at that time very much in vogue, the rom~an galant oriental.2 This unexpected descendant of the Arabian Nights had as its chief progenitor Claude Prosper J olyot CrebiIlon, Crebillon fils. Pseudo-oriental in colouring, the works belonging to this genre were primarily fairy tales with a strong element of eroticism and an occasional dash of satire, and their essential quality was that 'tact dans l'audace' defined by Cocteau, which consists in knowing 'jusqu' ou on peut aIler trop loin'. Diderot reproduced most of these characteristics in the Bijoux indiscrets, but failed to observe the importance of the last one, with the result that his novel is coarse to the point of pornography. It has, nevertheless, one or two redeeming features, of interest to the literary historian. In the main, Diderot limits the elements of magic and Orientalism, and transforms his erotic subject into a satire of that age-old object of masculine scorn, women. But he gives his theme a new twist. Women, according to the Bijoux indiscrets, are fickle, but they cannot help it; it is their physiological make-up which is responsible. They are, in short, machines or 'automatons',3 whose behaviour is largely determined by the promptings of their sex-instinct. .This is a half-humorous extension of Descartes' theory of ~animal machines'i to human behaviour. Descartes had suggested that those aspects of animal behaviour which appear to be the effects of intelligence are simply mechanical responses to various stimuli: Diderot implies that the same is true of women. (He adds, generously, that 'les trois quarts des hommes" are in the same case.) He does not explore the idea |
