The Indiscreet Jewels

The Indiscreet Jewels marks Diderot's first foray into fictional prose and is his most commercially successful work during his lifetime. Set in a thinly disguised version of contemporary France reimagined as the Congo, this libertine novel centers on Sultan Mangogul, who receives a magical ring that allows him to make women's genitalia ("jewels") speak and reveal their sexual histories. Though often dismissed as mere libertine fiction, beneath the novel's bawdy surface lies a chaotic social critique, philosophical discourse, and political satire representing the intellectual Chaos of the Enlightenment. Through the device of talking genitals, Diderot explores themes of truth, hypocrisy, and the gap between public virtue and private behavior. The work's commercial success-it went through several editions despite official censorship-helped finance Diderot's more serious philosophical endeavors, including his work on the Encyclopédie. Diderot's "The Indiscreet Jewels" (1748) deliberately follows in the tradition of Rabelaisian satire. Like Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1530s-1550s), Diderot uses sexual content and fantasy as vehicles for social critique. Diderot's work is more directly philosophical, while Rabelais' satire is more carnivalesque. Both writers employ what Bakhtin called the "carnivalesque" - using bodily functions, sexuality, and inversions of social hierarchy as tools for liberation from social constraints. Jewels stands as Diderot's most Rabelaisian work, showing his appreciation for that earlier tradition while adapting it to more aggressive 18th-century philosophical purposes, but still directed at the clergy, like Rabelais. This edition contains a new Afterword by the translator, a short biography, a glossary of Philosophical Terms used by Diderot, a chronology of his core life and works, and a summary index of all of Diderot's works. With a clean, modern translation of Diderot's Enlightenment-era French, this edition brings Diderot's thoughts directly into the modern intellectual sphere, tracing the intellectual forces which swept along Diderot and impacted today's secular sphere.