“Strange damps are rising from cracks in the earth, damps that someone has been distilling into heady liquors with which to cloud the mind of Philosophy. Who is responsible for these volumes of graveyard poetry, these Gothic novels that set at defiance the hard-won standards of reason and verisimilitude? Diderot himself has developed a taste for them, and seems ready to topple into the grave. When he disappears, it is up to the Friendly Examiner to find him—at hazard of his own life and the happiness of Fabienne, his wife, who goes looking for him when he fails to return…”
— Louis Marvick