The tale was first conceived as a practical joke on an impressionable philanthropist, the Marquis de Croismare, who in 1757 had exercised his influence in behalf of a nun seeking release from her vows. Not even personally acquainted with the young woman, he engaged legal aid for her but had no success, and she was forced to remain in her convent. A few years later, when she was unobtrusively transferred to another religious house, Diderot, Grimm, and other friends of de Croismare’s conceived the idea of pretending that she had escaped, and Diderot forged a series of letters in which she appealed to her former benefactor for some means of support in a place where her religious “persecutors” could not find her. The victim of the hoax was so moved by it that he offered her (by mail) a position as companion to his daughter, and the perpetrators were forced to fabricate an account of her sudden death. It was not till eight years later that the marquis learned the truth, and “was able to laugh at the incident over which he had earlier wept.”[6] In the meantime Diderot had invented a complete autobiography supposedly written by the girl during her last illness, and though this was not completed in time to become a part of the deception, it so engaged its author’s interest that he continued to work on the whole story intermittently for a couple of decades. It was pretty certainly finished by 1780, but was not published until 1796, when it appeared in its present form, along with the account of its composition. Written as her own artless journal, it gives the story of an illegitimate girl forced into convent life by a guilt-ridden mother and her suspicious husband. The victim resists her fate with extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity, but her struggles are futile, and she is merely transferred from one religious house to another, each exemplifying some pathological aspect of conventual sex-repression. Under the best abbess she meets nothing worse than a rather hysterical exaggeration of piety with slight variant overtones; in the second institution she encounters outright sadism, and in the third rampant homosexuality.