Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) by Denis Diderot

man in the face lest she let down her guard against the seduction of the senses; does all that prevent her heart from burning, does it prevent her sighs escaping, or her passions quickening, her desires tormenting her, or her imagination from replaying, by day as by night, scenes from
Le Portier des Chartreux
, or the positions described in Aretino? * So then what happens to her? What does her maid think as she jumps out of her bed in her shift, and flies to help her mistress who cries out that she’s dying? Justine, go back to bed. It’s not you your mistress is calling for in her delirium. And, were our friend Rameau some day to disdain fortune, women, fine dishes, idleness, and turn stoic, what would he be? A hypocrite. Rameau must be what he is: a lucky rogue among wealthy rogues, and not a trumpeter of virtue, or even a virtuous man, gnawing his crust of bread alone or in a company of beggars. And, in a word, I am not settling for your felicity, nor for the happiness of a few visionaries like yourself.
    ME: I see, my friend, you don’t know what I’ve been talking about, and you’re not even capable of learning about it.
    HIM: All the better, the Lord be thanked, all the better. It would make me croak from hunger, boredom, and perhaps from remorse.
    ME: So, in view of that, the only advice I have for you is to get back quickly inside the house from which you so imprudently got yourself thrown out.
    HIM: And to do what you don’t disapprove of in a literal sense, but I find rather repugnant in a metaphorical sense.
    ME: That’s my advice.
    HIM: Independently of that metaphor which offends me at this moment, and at some other moment won’t.
    ME: How odd you are!
    HIM: There’s nothing odd about it. I’m quite willing to be abject, but I want to be abject without constraint. I’m quite willing to lower my dignity … you’re laughing.
    ME: Yes, your dignity makes me laugh.
    HIM: Everyone has his dignity; I’m quite willing to forget mine, but when
I
choose, and not at someone else’s bidding. Why should anyone be able to say: ‘Grovel!’ and I be forced to grovel? Grovelling’s natural to the worm, and to me; that’s what we both do when we’re left to our own devices; but we rear up when we’re stepped on. I’ve been stepped on, and I intend to rear up. And then you’ve no idea what a bear garden the place is. Picture to yourself a gloomy, sullen individual, perpetually prey to the vapours, enveloped in two or three layers of dressing gown; he takes no pleasure in himself, he takes no pleasure in anything else; to raise the merest hint of a smile one must deploy physical and mental gyrations of a hundred different varieties; he observes the funny contortions of my features and those of my intellect—which are even funnier—with equal impassivity; just between ourselves, that père Noël, that ugly Benedictine who’s so famous for his grimaces, well, in spite of his success at court, and in all due modesty and fairness, compared with me he’s nothing but a wooden puppet. It’s in vain that I try to emulate the exquisite grimaces of lunatics; nothing works. Will he or won’t he laugh? That’s what I have to ask myself in the midst of my contortions, and you can imagine how badly this uncertainty affects my performance. My hypochondriac, his head buried in a nightcapcoming down to his eyes, looks like a motionless Chinese idol from beneath whose chin a string hangs, leading down under his chair. One waits for the string to be pulled, but it is not pulled; or, if the jaw happens to open slightly, it’s to utter some disheartening words, words which tell you that you have not been noticed, and that all your antics are wasted; the words answer a question you asked several days ago; once they are uttered, the mastoid spring relaxes and the jaws snap shut … * [Then he began to mimic his man; he settled into a chair, head rigid, hat pulled down to his eyelids, eyes half closed, arms hanging loosely,