Diderot's 1772 text Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Supplement to Bougainville's ‘Voyage around the World’) is a ‘riff’, as Lynn Festa puts it, on the explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville's memorable account of his landfall on Tahiti. The final text within a trilogy of moralising tales that includes Ceci n'est pas un conte (This is Not a Story) and Mme de La Carlière, Diderot's Tahitian fable targets his era's constricting jealousies, petty passions and denatured conventions by juxtaposing Tahiti's ‘natural society’ with a series of European notions and customs. The overall structure of this clash of cultures is worth recalling. In the opening pages of the Supplément, Diderot stages a discussion between the witty and inquisitive interlocutors A and B, both of whom are enlightened relativists. In this initial part of the text, the two friends jump quickly from topic to topic, speculating on continental drift, the mores of ancient peoples on isolated lands and the seemingly contradictory psychology of Bougainville himself. In the ensuing section, A and B ‘read’ together the hidden manuscript ostensibly found within Bougainville's original text. This first Tahitian section begins, as it were, with a forceful, regressive view of history delivered by an old Tahitian man who enumerates the inevitable consequences of colonisation: contamination, enslavement and perhaps the eventual extermination of the Tahitians. The subsequent portion of the text shifts to a different era, where we witness more fruitful contacts between Tahitians and Europeans.