This ironic-philosophical travel novel by the French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784), admired by Goethe, Hegel, and Karl Marx, could not be published until after his death in 1796. The servant Jacques and his nobleman master are on the road with no apparent destination, chatting with each other as they go. Of all people, the agile and bright Jacques turns out to be a fatalist who sees his life preordained in the heavenly role of destiny. His indolent and bored master, on the other hand, professes, no less paradoxically, the freedom of the will, but without using it—a grotesque constellation that Diderot uses for a depiction of the master-servant relationship interspersed with extensive social criticism.