Read "The Indiscreet Jewels" by Denis Diderot online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
While the prattle of the Toys employed the academy, in other companies it became the news of the day, and the subject of the morrow, and of several succeeding days. It was an inexhaustible text. True facts were blended with false; everything went down, the prodigy had removed all incredulity. In conversation people lived on it upwards of six months.
The Sultan had made but three trials of his ring; and yet, in a circle of ladies who were allowed a stool at the Manimonbanda's, one of them related a discourse held by the Toy of a president's lady, next that of a marchioness, then she disclosed the pious secrets of a devotee, infine those of several women who were not there: and God knows the stories that were father'd on their Toys; nor was there any parsimony of smutty tales. From facts they came to reflections. "I must confess," says one of those ladies, "that this witchcraft (for it is a spell cast on Toys) keeps us in a cruel state. How! to be eternally under apprehensions of hearing an impertinent voice issuing from one's self."