Rameau's Niece

"The method of science is the method of bold conjecture," she gasped, feeling a bold conjecture pressed suddenly down upon her.

"Do shut up, Margaret."

Bold conjectures and the ingenious and severe attempts to refute them, she thought.

Her shirt had dropped somewhere onto the floor with several periodicals. Edward's narrow chest was against her, her face was against his, their legs tangled, the world back in its proper orbit.

He was her bold conjecture. She could not refute him.

"Thorough," she whispered.

This was a thorough critical discussion. Severe and ingenious testing.

"Severe and ingenious."

"Yes, Margaret," Edward said, his voice hoarse in her ear. "Whatever, darling."





They lay quietly, wet with sweat, uncomfortable, their position absurd, their pleasure infinite.

In light of this critical discussion, in light of this severe testing, this ingenious testing, this modification of knowledge, this redemption, this remarriage, this lesson, this search for truth, this fucking on a desktop in an airless office, you seem by far to be the best, Edward, the best tested, the strongest. You seem to be the one nearest to truth.

"You're the best," Margaret whispered to her husband. "Of all my theories, Edward, you are the best."

MYSELF: And so, if you think carefully about it, you will agree that in the end our truest opinions are not the ones we have never changed, but those to which we have most often returned.





EPILOGUE


Margaret Nathan's book, Rameau's Niece and the Satin Underground, was eventually published, and while early reviews were on the whole respectful, even enthusiastic, a certain contradiction—some called it an egregious error—was soon widely noticed. "Ms. Nathan discusses the obvious connection between the eighteenth-century text Rameau's Niece and Diderot's Rameau's Nephew," one typical review remarked. "What she (incredibly!) fails to mention is that though Diderot wrote Rameau's Nephew in 1761 or thereabouts, he showed it to no one, as far as we know. It was not published until 1805, posthumously, and then only in a German translation made by Goethe from a transcription of a manuscript discovered in St. Petersburg."

"Oh God!" said Margaret. "I forgot."

How did the anonymous author borrow from a book that did not exist? Margaret asked herself this question, the obvious question, the question that would have brought her great scholarly renown had she thought to ask it before. Discovering a historical diamond, she had held it up to the light and marveled only at a prism.

Was Diderot himself the author? Did one of his friends, shown Rameau's Nephew in confidence, write his own unpublished response? Or was it Diderot's mistress? One of his students, perhaps, one with silky brown hair. Maybe Rameau's niece wrote Rameau's Niece! Rising from her bed, where she had spent the last several weeks in speechless mortification, Margaret began her research. And, dimly, she recalled something Diderot had said. Perhaps it was Diderot, anyway; perhaps it was what he said: It is my job to seek truth, not to find it.

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