In spite of the applause of the philosophic _claque_, led by Grimm,[253] posterity has ratified the coldness with which it was received by contemporaries.

_The Natural Son_ was written in 1757, but it was not until 1771 that the directors of the French Comedy could be induced to place it on the stage.

The actors detested their task, and as we can very well believe, went sulkily through parts which they had not even taken the trouble to master.[254] The public felt as little interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after a single representation, the play was put aside.
Ill-natured critics compared Diderot's play with Rousseau's opera; they insisted that _The Natural Son_ and _The Village Conjuror_ were a couple of monuments of the presumptuous incompetence of the encyclopaedic cabal.

The failure of _The Natural Son_ as a drama came after it had enjoyed considerable success as a piece of literature, for it had been fourteen years in print.

We can only suppose that this success was the fruit of an unflinching partisanship.
It is a curious illustration of the strength of the current passion for moral maxims in season and out of season, that one scene which to the scoffers of that day seemed, as it cannot but seem to everybody to-day, a climax of absurdity and unbecomingness, was hailed by the party as most admirable, for no other reason than that it contained a number of high moralising saws.