Should I bother to finish?

It's degenerated to a series of boring, R-rated sex stories featuring mostly adultery but also fornication by monks, virgins, and whatever.

Really, is that his best?

There is very little of the novel to this thing.

More like Boccaccio.

Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist.

Mme. de La Pommeraye

Diderot's defense of her psychopathic vengeance, about the middle of the book, presupposes both that adultery in her husband's favor would be accounted a good thing by the general reader and by the CMW and that, at any rate for a young virgin, getting laid is a huuuuge sacrifice.

Neither is true, today, I think.

And in 1796?

I think not.

And, of course, that psychopathic people and behavior are extreme but on the spectrum of normal.

Come to that, it includes a defense of her specific psychopathy.

Oxford World Classics, 2008, p 136 and thereabouts.

Early feminism.

Reading Jacques the Fatalist.

The story of Jacques's Captain's friend

How many times can a man be run through and live?

Reading Jacques the Fatalist.

M. Le Pelletier

A story I did not expect in Jacques the Fatalist.

A man gives his family fortune to the poor and then nags everyone he knows with money to give it to the poor.

They don't, and one slaps his face for seriously over-nagging.