Test and Context of Rousseau's Relations With Diderot

JULIE, OU LA NOUVELLE HELOISE already had a preface and had been in print for two weeks when the Preface de Julie first appeared, belatedly, unnecessarily, under separate cover.1 Rescued at Rousseau's insistence from the margins of the novel, the so-called seconde preface or preface dialoguee could and still does command attention as a text in its own right. Even the most naive encounter with the Preface de Julie confirms Mme de Cramer-Delon's early impression of having come up against une maniere d'enigme.2 Even so hostile a contemporary reader as Grimm bore witness to the Preface de Julie's capacity for resisting immediate apprehension, when he called it en quatre-vingt-dix pages un recueil fort serre de sophismes oiu la bonne foi est offensee a chaque ligne.3 In Rousseau's hands, the occasional text is no perfunctory rhetorical exercise; rather, it evolves into an occasion for something other than the anticipated rehearsal of what had become, by mid-century, the shopworn topoi of novelprefacing. Somehow opaque and problematical, this preface invites the kind of sustained and serious critical attention recently accorded

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