Key takeaways

  • Diderot turns his loss into a warning for his friends, "Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its constraints."
  • His old study was poor but consistent. The chair, the table, the prints and the gown all belonged together.
  • The scarlet gown broke that consistency, in the line that matters most to the whole essay, "No more harmony, no more unity, no more beauty."

In the first chapter Diderot mourned his old dressing gown. Now he turns to his friends with a warning, casts himself as a philosopher who has sold out, and looks back at the room he used to work in. Nothing has been bought yet in this chapter. What he describes is the moment a set of things stops belonging together, which is where every Diderot chain begins.

The text, with notes

My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, beware the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its constraints.

Diogenes, if you could see your disciple in the splendid cloak of Aristippus, how you would laugh. Aristippus, that splendid cloak was paid for with a good deal of groveling. What a contrast between your soft, fawning, pampered life and the free, steady life of the ragged Cynic. I have left the barrel where I was king to serve under a tyrant.

Note. Diogenes the Cynic lived in Athens with almost nothing, sheltering in a large storage jar, the “barrel” of later retellings. Aristippus of Cyrene, a pupil of Socrates, taught that pleasure was the good and lived comfortably at the court of the tyrant of Syracuse. Ancient anecdotes set the two against each other, the beggar needling the courtier. Diderot casts himself as a Cynic who has gone over to Aristippus, trading his barrel for a fine cloak and a master. Aristippus comes back at the very end of the essay, with a better line.

That is not all, my friend. Hear the havoc that luxury wreaks, and where a luxury that insists on consistency leads.

A phrase we had to spell out. Diderot warns against un luxe conséquent. In his French, conséquent described someone who follows a principle through to its conclusions. A luxury of that kind is not content with one fine object: it insists that everything around it live up to it. That is the Diderot effect in three words, so we spelled out the meaning rather than writing “consistent luxury,” which says little in English.

My old dressing gown was all of a piece with the other rags around me. A straw chair, a wooden table, a Bergamo wall hanging, a pine plank holding up a few books, a few smoke-darkened prints without frames, nailed by their corners to the hanging, and between the prints three or four plaster casts hung on the wall: together with my old dressing gown, they made the most harmonious poverty.

Everything is out of tune. No more harmony, no more unity, no more beauty.

Note. These two short sentences are the heart of the essay. Diderot’s poverty had been coherent: cheap chair, cheap table, cheap prints, old gown, every piece at the same level. The scarlet gown broke the set. When the anthropologist Grant McCracken named the Diderot effect in 1988, he called a set of goods that belong together a “Diderot unity,” and unité is the word Diderot uses here.

A new housekeeper, a barren one, taking over a rectory; the wife who moves into a widower’s house; the minister who replaces a minister fallen from favor; the Molinist bishop who seizes the diocese of a Jansenist bishop: none of them causes more upheaval than the scarlet intruder has caused in my home.

Note. Diderot lists four takeovers in which a newcomer clears out the old order: a rectory, a widower’s household, a government ministry and a diocese. The last one needed no explanation in 1769. French Catholicism had been divided for more than a century between the Jansenists, rigorists who stressed the power of divine grace, and their opponents, led by the Jesuits, whose theology owed much to the Jesuit Luis de Molina. A Molinist bishop arriving in a Jansenist diocese could be expected to replace everything and everyone.

I can look at a peasant woman without distaste. The scrap of coarse cloth over her head, the hair falling loose about her cheeks, the torn rags that half cover her, the poor short petticoat that reaches only halfway down her legs, the bare feet caked in mud: none of it offends me. It is the picture of a condition I respect, the whole sum of the hardships of a necessary and unhappy lot, and I pity it. But my stomach turns, and in spite of the cloud of perfume that follows her, I walk the other way and look elsewhere when I meet the courtesan whose headdress of point d’Angleterre lace, torn cuffs, dirty silk stockings and worn-out shoes show me today’s poverty paired with yesterday’s luxury.

That is what my home would have looked like, had the imperious scarlet not tuned everything to its own pitch.

Note. The comparison can sound harsh, so read it closely. Diderot is not disgusted by poverty; he says he respects it. What turns his stomach is the mismatch: lace from yesterday’s wealth worn with today’s dirt. Point d’Angleterre, despite the name, was fine lace from Brussels, sold in France under an English label. The courtesan is his picture of a half-upgraded room, neither honestly poor nor properly rich, and the last sentence explains why his study had to go all the way.

What to notice

The chapter’s logic runs backward from the way we usually talk about spending. Diderot does not begin with a desire for a new chair or a new desk. He begins with discord: one fine thing among plain ones, and a feeling that the whole room is now wrong. The choice he describes is not between buying and not buying, but between a room that is out of tune and a room tuned up to the scarlet. In the next chapter he shows us what the tuning cost, one object at a time.

Read this chapter in the original French

Mes amis, gardez vos vieux amis. Mes amis, craignez l’atteinte de la richesse. Que mon exemple vous instruise. La pauvreté a ses franchises ; l’opulence a sa gêne.

Diogène ! si tu voyais ton disciple sous le fastueux manteau d’Aristippe, comme tu rirais ! Aristippe, ce manteau fastueux fut payé par bien des bassesses. Quelle comparaison de ta vie molle, rampante, efféminée, et de la vie libre et ferme du cynique déguenillé ! j’ai quitté le tonneau où je régnais, pour servir sous un tyran.

Ce n’est pas tout, mon ami. Écoutez les ravages du luxe, les suites d’un luxe conséquent.

Ma vieille robe de chambre était une avec les autres guenilles qui m’environnaient. Une chaise de paille, une table de bois, une tapisserie de Bergame, une planche de sapin qui soutenait quelques livres, quelques estampes enfumées, sans bordure, clouées par les angles sur cette tapisserie ; entre ces estampes trois ou quatre plâtres suspendus formaient avec ma vieille robe de chambre l’indigence la plus harmonieuse.

Tout est désaccordé. Plus d’ensemble, plus d’unité, plus de beauté.

Une nouvelle gouvernante stérile qui succède dans un presbytère, la femme qui entre dans la maison d’un veuf, le ministre qui remplace un ministre disgracié, le prélat moliniste qui s’empare du diocèse d’un prélat janséniste, ne causent pas plus de trouble que l’écarlate intruse en a causé chez moi.

Je puis supporter sans dégoût la vue d’une paysanne. Ce morceau de toile grossière qui couvre sa tête ; cette chevelure qui tombe éparse sur ses joues ; ces haillons troués qui la vêtissent à demi ; ce mauvais cotillon court qui ne va qu’à la moitié de ses jambes ; ces pieds nus et couverts de fange ne peuvent me blesser : c’est l’image d’un état que je respecte ; c’est l’ensemble des disgrâces d’une condition nécessaire et malheureuse que je plains. Mais mon cœur se soulève ; et, malgré l’atmosphère parfumée qui la suit, j’éloigne mes pas, je détourne mes regards de cette courtisane dont la coiffure à points d’Angleterre, et les manchettes déchirées, les bas de soie sales et la chaussure usée, me montrent la misère du jour associée à l’opulence de la veille.

Tel eût été mon domicile, si l’impérieuse écarlate n’eût tout mis à son unisson.

Sources

  1. Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (Denis Diderot, Œuvres complètes, edited by J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, Garnier, 1875, volume IV, pages 5 to 12) The French text we translate from, in the public domain.
  2. Diogenes (Wikipedia) The Cynic who lived in a storage jar, and his exchanges with Aristippus.
  3. Aristippus (Wikipedia) The pupil of Socrates who taught that pleasure is the good and lived at the court of Syracuse.
  4. Jansenism (Wikipedia) The rigorist Catholic movement and its quarrel with the Jesuits.
  5. Molinism (Wikipedia) The theology named for the Jesuit Luis de Molina.
  6. Brussels lace (Wikipedia) Why Brussels lace was sold in France as point d'Angleterre.
  7. Culture and Consumption (Grant McCracken, Indiana University Press, 1988; this page is the 1990 paperback) The chapter that named Diderot unities and the Diderot effect.
  1. The old robe and the new

    The Essay: Diderot mourns the shapeless old gown that fit him like a second skin, and discovers that the splendid new one has made him its servant.

  2. The study, piece by piece

    The Essay: The chair, the hanging, the prints, the bookshelf, the mirror, the casts, the table. Diderot lists what the scarlet gown pushed out, one object at a time, and curses the taste that did it.

  3. The Diderot effect, explained

    The Effect: One new thing makes everything around it look shabby, so you buy more. Where the idea comes from, why it works on nearly everyone, and how to stop it.

  4. Where the Diderot effect comes from: the robe, the essay and the name

    The Effect: A philosopher who was poor until an empress bought his books, a salon hostess who refurnished his study, an essay passed around Europe's courts, and an anthropologist who named it two centuries later.

  5. Diderot effect quotes: the lines from the essay people repeat

    The Effect: The master and the slave, the room out of tune, the corner that asked for a cabinet. Twelve passages from the essay, in our own translation, and what each one says to anyone about to buy something new.

  6. Uniform dressing

    Wardrobe: Pick one outfit formula that works, own it in a few versions, and wear it most days. Fewer decisions, fewer purchases, and a wardrobe that stops asking for more.

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