7. Published posthumously in 1830, Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien was evidently the subject in a letter of August 1773 to Mme d’Epinay, a letter written in the Hague on the eve of his departure for St. Peterburg: “un certain pamphlet sur l’art de l’acteur est presque devenu un ouvrage.” See Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien précéde des Entretiens sur le fils naturel, with a chronology and preface by Raymond Laubreaux (Paris: [Garnier]-Flammarion, 1981), 120. A translation is published in Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 98–158. These are the texts to which I refer in the following. My own translation is drawn from Bremner and to an extent from a translation by Walter Herries Pollack: Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting; and William Archer, Masks or Faces? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 11–71.