Key takeaways
- The essay opens after the loss, with Diderot asking why he ever gave up his old dressing gown.
- The old gown fit him, served him as a pen wiper and dust cloth, and showed the world he was a working writer.
- The new scarlet gown is beautiful but stiff, and he now lives in fear of spoiling it.
- His most quoted line comes here, in our words, "I was the absolute master of my old dressing gown; I have become the slave of the new one."
About this translation. This is our own English translation, made for this site from the French text of Diderot’s essay as printed in the 1875 edition of his complete works, which is in the public domain. We have aimed for plain modern English that keeps Diderot’s jokes and his rhythm, rather than a word-for-word crib. Short notes explain his references as they come up, and the French original of each chapter is at the end of its page.
Diderot wrote the essay in 1769, and it was first printed in 1772. It opens in the middle of a regret: the old gown is already gone, and the new one is already a problem. This first chapter covers the first five paragraphs, in which he mourns the old robe and takes the measure of the new one. In the chapters that follow, the scarlet gown goes to work on the rest of his study.
The text, with notes
Why did I not keep it? It was made for me, and I was made for it. It followed every fold of my body without ever cramping it; I looked picturesque, even handsome. The new one, stiff and starched, turns me into a tailor’s dummy. There was no need it would not stoop to serve, for poverty is nearly always obliging. Was a book covered in dust? One of its flaps offered itself to wipe it clean. Had the ink thickened and refused to leave my pen? It offered its side. You could see the many services it had done me traced along it in long black streaks. Those streaks announced the man of letters, the writer, the man who works. Now I look like a rich idler, and nobody knows who I am.
Note. The gown is already gone when the essay begins, so we meet it the way we meet a lost friend, through what it used to do. In French a dressing gown, robe de chambre, is feminine, which lets Diderot speak of it almost as a person, a game he plays all through the essay. “Obliging” translates officieuse, which in his day meant eager to be of service, not pushy in the modern sense. The ink streaks matter: they were a public sign of his work. The new gown erases them, and with them the version of himself that other people could see.
Under its shelter I feared nothing: not a servant’s clumsiness, nor my own, nor sparks from the fire, nor a splash of water. I was the absolute master of my old dressing gown; I have become the slave of the new one.
Note. This is the line most often quoted from the essay, and the turn on which the whole piece depends. The old gown protected him; the new one has to be protected. A possession meant to serve its owner has begun to give the orders, which is the first step in every spending chain the essay goes on to describe.
The dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece was no more anxious than I am. Worry has me wrapped up.
Note. In Greek myth the Golden Fleece hung in a sacred grove, watched over in most tellings by a dragon that never slept, until Jason and Medea carried it off. Diderot casts himself as that sleepless guard, standing watch over a piece of cloth. The last sentence carries a pun we have tried to keep: Le souci m’enveloppe, worry wraps itself around me, as a dressing gown would.
The besotted old man who has handed himself over, bound hand and foot, to the whims and the mercy of a flighty young woman, says from morning to night: Where is my good, my old housekeeper? What demon possessed me, the day I sent her away for this one? And then he weeps, and he sighs.
Note. The infatuated old man and his reckless young companion are stock figures of the comic stage in Diderot’s time. Here the new gown plays the young woman who has taken over the household, and the old gown plays the trusted housekeeper who was dismissed to make room for her. The joke has a point: the newcomer is exciting, but she runs the house, and the household was better run before.
I do not weep, and I do not sigh, but every moment I say: Curse the man who invented the art of making common cloth precious by dyeing it scarlet. Curse the costly garment that I stand in awe of. Where is my old, my humble, my comfortable rag of calamanco?
Note. Scarlet cloth was a luxury in eighteenth-century Europe, because the dyes that produced a deep, lasting red were costly. Diderot’s complaint is precise: the new gown is not made of anything special, it is the color that makes it precious, and the color that makes him afraid of it. Calamanco, his old gown’s fabric, was a glazed woolen cloth in everyday use at the time. Diderot himself calls it humble. We kept his triple description, old, humble and comfortable, because it is a small portrait of everything the scarlet gown is not.
What to notice
Read these five paragraphs again and look at what Diderot does not complain about. The new gown is not ugly, badly made or uncomfortable in any ordinary sense. His objections are that it does not fit the man he was, that it has to be protected, and that it no longer tells anyone who he is. Those are the same feelings that, in the chapters that follow, turn a single gift into a refurnished room.
Read this chapter in the original French
Pourquoi ne l’avoir pas gardée ? Elle était faite à moi ; j’étais fait à elle. Elle moulait tous les plis de mon corps sans le gêner ; j’étais pittoresque et beau. L’autre, raide, empesée, me mannequine. Il n’y avait aucun besoin auquel sa complaisance ne se prêtât ; car l’indigence est presque toujours officieuse. Un livre était-il couvert de poussière, un de ses pans s’offrait à l’essuyer. L’encre épaissie refusait-elle de couler de ma plume, elle présentait le flanc. On y voyait tracés en longues raies noires les fréquents services qu’elle m’avait rendus. Ces longues raies annonçaient le littérateur, l’écrivain, l’homme qui travaille. À présent, j’ai l’air d’un riche fainéant ; on ne sait qui je suis.
Sous son abri, je ne redoutais ni la maladresse d’un valet, ni la mienne, ni les éclats du feu, ni la chute de l’eau. J’étais le maître absolu de ma vieille robe de chambre ; je suis devenu l’esclave de la nouvelle.
Le dragon qui surveillait la toison d’or ne fut pas plus inquiet que moi. Le souci m’enveloppe.
Le vieillard passionné qui s’est livré, pieds et poings liés, aux caprices, à la merci d’une jeune folle, dit depuis le matin jusqu’au soir : Où est ma bonne, ma vieille gouvernante ? Quel démon m’obsédait le jour que je la chassai pour celle-ci ! Puis il pleure, il soupire.
Je ne pleure pas, je ne soupire pas ; mais à chaque instant je dis : Maudit soit celui qui inventa l’art de donner du prix à l’étoffe commune en la teignant en écarlate ! Maudit soit le précieux vêtement que je révère ! Où est mon ancien, mon humble, mon commode lambeau de calemande ?
Sources
- 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.
- Calamanco (Wikipedia) The glazed woolen cloth of Diderot's old gown.
- Golden Fleece (Wikipedia) The myth behind the guarding dragon in the third paragraph.
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