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The prose of Jules Laforgue recalls to me his description of the orchestra in Salomé, the fourth of the Moralités légendaires. Sur un mode allègre et fataliste, un orchestre aux instruments d'ivoire improvisait une petite overture unanime. That his syllables are of ivory I feel, and improvised, but his themes are pluralistic, the immedicable and colossal ennui of life the chiefest.
There may be good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, CET ESPRIT FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet calls it, not without a shudder.
This was why Voltaire, who was a son of the seventeenth century before he was the patriarchal sire of the eighteenth, could never thoroughly understand the author of the New Heloisa, or the author of the Père de Famille and Jacques le Fataliste. Such work was to him for the most part a detestable compound of vulgarity and rodomontade. Nothing living but this! But this is much and very much.
Jacques, le fataliste is tiresome; Le Neveu de Rameau gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to something, to something powerful such as the Satiricon of Petronius, or El Buscon of Quevedo; but at the end, it is nothing. The only writer of the pre-revolutionary period who can be read today with any pleasure and this, perhaps, is because he does not attempt anything is Chamfort.
The examples which I have given of the way in which such an occurrence would have been treated in classic times may not suit the ideas of honorable people; so let me recommend to their notice, as a kind of antidote, the story of Monsieur Desglands in Diderot's masterpiece, Jacques le fataliste.
The reader of Bayle and Brantôme had been introduced to a bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the author of La Pucelle and Jacques le Fataliste proceeded from the same pen as the University for Russia.
Voltaire hardly left a single corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history, philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist. Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, de omni scibili, and was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.
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