as himself very
fond of paradoxes,[379] though not of the wretched things which now
disgrace the name) remains. The very subject of the book, or of the
greatest part of it, was for a long time, if it is not still, taboo; and
even if this had not been the case, it has other drawbacks. It
originated in, and to some extent still retains traces of, one of the
silly and ill-bred "mystifications" in which the eighteenth and early
nineteenth century delighted.[380] It is, at least in appearance, badly
tainted with purpose; and while it is actually left unfinished, the last
pages of it, as they stand, are utterly unworthy of the earlier part,
and in fact quite uninteresting. Momus or Zoilus must be allowed to say
so much: but having heard him, let us cease to listen to the half-god or
the whole philologist.

[Sidenote: Its story.]

Yet _La Religieuse_, for all its drawbacks, is almost a great, and might
conceivably have been a very great book. Madame d'Holbach is credited by
Diderot's own generosity with having suggested its crowning _mot_,[381]
and her influence may have been in other ways good by governing the
force and fire, so often wasted or ill-directed, of Diderot's genius.
Soeur Sainte-Suzanne is the youngest daughter of a respectable
middle-class family. She perceives, or half-perceives (for, though no
fool, she is a guileless and unsuspicious creature), that she is
unwelcome there; the most certain sign of which is that, while her
sisters are married and dowered handsomely, she is condemned to be a
nun. She has, though quite real piety, no "vocation," and though she
allows herself to be coaxed through her novitiate, she at last, in face
of almost insuperable difficulties, summons up courage enough to
refuse, at the very altar, the final profession. There is, of course, a
terrible scandal; she has more black looks in the family than ever, and
at last her mother confesses that she is an illegitimate child, and
therefore hated by her putative father, whose love for his wife,
however, has induced him to forgive her, and not actually renounce (as
indeed, by French law, he could not) the child. Broken in heart and
spirit, Suzanne at last accepts her doom. She is fortunate in one
abbess, but the next persecutes her, brings all sorts of false
accusations against her, strips, starves, imprisons, and actually
tortures her by means of the _amende honorable_. She manages to get her
complaints known and to secure a counsel, and