Editorial preface

Diderot drafted his review of Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde in 1771, shortly after the work was published. Although in the Voyage the material on Tahiti occupied just two brief chapters, it was that material which most attracted Diderot's attention; and his treatment of it, together with an amplification of his direct appeal to Bougainville in the review to leave Tahiti as he found it, forms the major part of the first two sections of the Supplément. By October 1772 Diderot had recast and expanded the review as a dialogue within a dialogue which took up themes from two of his short stories that would first be circulated in Grimm's Correspondance littéraire in 1773, and in this new form the Supplément, now described as a ‘Suite des contes de M. Diderot’, was also circulated in successive issues of that manuscript periodical. He thereafter continued to enlarge the work, mainly in the final section, to which some of the additions may even be by his disciple and editor of the 1798 collection of his Œuvres, Jacques-André Naigeon; and he then intercalated the episode devoted to Polly Baker, drawn from the original (1770) edition of Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The Supplément was first published, from an unknown manuscript, and without the Polly Baker episode, by Bourlet de Vauxcelles, in 1796, in a collection of pieces entitled Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires.