The Indiscreet Jewels

Denis Diderot’s first novel, published anonymously in 1748, is a bawdy Oriental fantasy with a sharp satirical edge. The bored Sultan Mangogul of a thinly disguised France is given a magic ring that forces women to confess their sexual histories, not from their lips but from their ‘jewels.’ What begins as a smutty court amusement becomes Diderot’s cover for mocking the hypocrisy, vanity, and gossip of Louis XV’s Versailles, with jabs at contemporary science, philosophy, and opera folded in. Diderot later dismissed the book as a youthful indiscretion, yet its wit and its contempt for official morality already point toward the freethinker he would become. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.