Novella: This is Not a Story

Overview
Denis Diderot stages a conversation between two friends who trade episodes drawn from real life, probing whether virtue, love, and justice ever line up. He calls it "not a story" to signal that the pieces lack the tidy arcs and consolations of fiction. Instead of an edifying plot, the work offers two stark case studies, one about a devoted man exploited by a calculating woman, the other about a gifted woman sacrificed to an unworthy lover, framed by a debate over how to judge them. The result is a lucid anatomy of sentiment, interest, and social hypocrisy in the Enlightenment city.

The frame
A narrator recounts true incidents to a skeptical interlocutor. They interrupt, object, and qualify, testing each anecdote for moral clarity and narrative meaning. The frame keeps judgment open: each tale is followed by a counter-argument that blurs guilt and merit, pushing the reader to weigh compassion against prudence.

The first tale: Tanié and Madame Reymer
Tanié is a capable, decent man consumed by his passion for Madame Reymer, a married woman who enjoys his devotion without accepting its cost. She measures affection by its usefulness. Seeing in Tanié a tireless agent, she nudges him into distant commercial ventures that serve her interests. He obeys, leaves Paris, risks health and fortune, and spends years building wealth with her future in mind. When he returns, broken by effort and illness, he seeks the reward he has imagined: gratitude, tenderness, perhaps a life together. She receives him with polite coldness. His self-effacement touches nothing in her that self-interest does not immediately revise. Tanié soon dies. Madame Reymer’s response is brisk, proper, and bloodless; she arranges decorum, calculates reputational risk, and moves on. The interlocutor calls her monstrous. The narrator replies that society smiles on her exact blend of elegance and utility, and that Tanié’s ruin proceeds less from her malice than from his own credulity and the world’s quiet endorsement of profitable feelings.

The second tale: Mlle de La Chaux and Gardeil
The next episode reverses the sexes while preserving the asymmetry. Mlle de La Chaux is learned, industrious, and generous. She binds her fate to Gardeil, a mediocre man hungry for advancement. She teaches herself disciplines he needs, prepares his papers, supports him with her labor, sells her trinkets, and pulls strings when he falters. He wins recognition and then abandons her for a safer, richer match. Reduced to precarious work, she still refuses bitterness. When Gardeil later returns in need, she helps again, secures him a position, and asks for nothing. Her talents, dazzling when turned to her own projects, are diffused in service to a man who does not deserve them. The friends argue over where the fault lies. Was her boundless generosity a virtue gone imprudent, or a society’s cruelty that leaves brilliant women no honorable path except to attach themselves to a man?

Themes and design
Both episodes expose a disjunction between moral worth and worldly reward. Love, when yoked to interest, becomes a polite instrument rather than a sentiment; self-sacrifice, unguided by self-respect, risks turning into a vice. The dialogue suppresses the easy moral that literature usually supplies. One voice condemns, the other relativizes, noting how often elegance and egoism pass for good conduct, how often warm hearts mistake exploitation for devotion. The title’s refusal, "not a story", marks an experiment: reality seldom completes a plot or distributes justice. The reader is left holding judgments that never settle, which is precisely the point.