Among the many projects he worked on during his last years, he wrote a play that he would eventually entitle Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? (Is He Good? Is He Wicked?).24 In stark contrast to his far more earnest and moralizing bourgeois dramas, this short comedy recounts a day in the life of Hardouin, a Parisian man of letters who, very much like Diderot himself, experiments with the idea that working in the interest of the greater good often means moral compromise, if not downright
