Diderot Regrets Old East Wing

Denis Diderot

Echoes of the Inkwell | An imagined essay. This piece is written in the voice of Denis Diderot (1713–1784), composed with AI assistance. It is not his actual writing. Every fact in it comes from the public record and is listed at the end. The opinions belong to the voice alone.

By Denis Diderot | as imagined for Echoes of the Inkwell | November 2026

My friend, why did no one stop me? I once had an old dressing gown. It was patched at the elbows and black at the hem where I wiped my pen, and it followed every fold of me without pinching anywhere. Then a kind and wealthy lady, Madame Geoffrin, who could not bear to see a philosopher dressed like one, took it away and gave me a new one in scarlet. Within the year I had lost my study, my peace, and a good part of my opinion of myself. I set the whole sorry business down in 1768 as a warning to anyone with more taste than fortune. I was the absolute master of my old gown, I wrote. I had become the slave of the new one.

I assumed the warning had been understood. I see now that it reached Washington late, and was read backward.

The First Thread Pulled

It begins, as it always begins, with something small. In my case it was a gown. In Washington it was a little gold. Early last year the President told an interviewer that the Oval Office “needed a little life,” and the life arrived in gilt: along the ceiling moldings, around the doorframes, on the cherubs above the doors, and in gold frames around a great many new portraits.

A gilded room, of course, cannot be expected to look out on an ordinary lawn. So the grass of the Rose Garden was dug up and paved over in white stone. The President explained that women in high heels sank into the grass. I believe him. I also once heard a scarlet gown explain why my straw chair had to go to the antechamber. The reasons are always excellent, and the new thing always supplies them.

Meanwhile the bathroom beside the Lincoln Bedroom, tiled green since the Truman years, was redone in what the President called “black and white polished Statuary marble,” which he judged “very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln.” Historians replied that the room was a sitting room in Lincoln’s day and was unlikely to have held any marble at all. No matter. When my Bergamo rug gave way to damask, I too discovered that damask had been the original intention.

The Room Rebuilt to Suit the Gown

Then, my friend, the East Wing. I am the last man in Europe entitled to scold anyone for a renovation. My whole study was rearranged to suit one garment. But I did not knock down the house. In October of last year the East Wing was demolished to make room for a ballroom, and the little family theater went down with it. The new building has grown to some 90,000 square feet. On the eleventh of this month Representative James Clyburn posted an aerial photograph and observed that the unfinished ballroom is now “bigger than the rest of the White House.” I studied that photograph a long while. It is exactly the view of my study as it would have looked had I let the scarlet gown draw the plans.

A ballroom, once it exists, also needs a reason, and this one has collected several. The President now calls it the “Military/Ballroom Complex” and describes its ceilings as “drone-proof, missile-proof, bulletproof.” A dance floor that is also a fortress. I thought my new desk excessive because it attracted papers.

Nor did it stop at the ballroom, because nothing ever does. A helipad went onto the South Lawn, crowned with a presidential seal in granite a hundred feet across. When the President took issue with its look and its slope, the contractors took it apart and did it over. Lafayette Square, across the street, is being redone. Under the previous administration that work was projected at $3.3 million; it is now costing more than $17 million. A new screening center for visitors is planned. The Washington Post, having read the contracts, puts the bill for all the work on the grounds at no less than $927 million.

Who Paid for the Gown

Here I must make one confession in my own favor. My scarlet gown was a gift. Madame Geoffrin paid for it, and for the new furniture besides, out of her own purse. I was ruined in taste, not in the treasury of France.

The account in Washington runs differently. In February of last year the President said the ballroom would cost “nothing” and that he would “spend the whole thing myself.” In July the White House announced a price of $200 million, to be paid by the President and “other patriot donors.” The figure then rose to $250 million, then $300 million, and in December, at a Hanukkah reception, to $400 million. By March of this year the builder, Clark Construction, had sent the White House a summary putting the cost at $600 million, with $293 million of it from private sources. For the wider works the Post found $500 million transferred from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, against $305 million from donors.

So the gown was promised as a gift, and the public is paying for the room. I do not know the French for this. I suspect the English is “taxpayer.”

Whether It Was Permitted

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a society chartered by Congress for exactly this sort of trouble, went to court and argued that only Congress may authorize such building. A federal judge agreed that it probably needed Congress’s approval, and a court of appeals agreed with him. In August the Supreme Court, by five votes to four, let the work go on. It did not say the building was lawful. It said the preservationists probably had no standing to complain. The Chief Justice dissented, writing that the construction was allowed to proceed “not because that construction is legal.” In Paris we would have called that a very polite verdict: the door was open, so no one could be blamed for walking through it.

The Last Beam

On the third of this month the President’s party lost both houses of Congress. On the fourth, in his first appearance before the press since, he went to the building site, watched the last steel beam hoisted into place, and signed it, writing “Love!” above his name between two golden presidential seals. “I like beautiful things,” he said, “and especially when it comes to the White House.” He added that he spends very little time on it, but does it because “it’s relaxing … I love construction.”

I believe that too. My friend, I have never been so peaceful as on the afternoon I chose a frame for my Vernet. There is nothing more restful in the world than arranging one’s possessions while the house comes down around them.

A Prayer, Revised

When I wrote my regrets I ended with a prayer. I asked Heaven to strip away my luxuries and send me back to my straw chair and my plank of books, but to leave me the Vernet. I was never a consistent man.

Let me offer a better prayer for my American friends. Do not take away the ballroom; it is too late for that, and the beam is signed. Only keep one shabby thing from the old house, the way I kept my old strip of selvage rug under the fine new desk, so that each morning, coming in proud in scarlet, I would look down and remember where I began. The house in Washington began as the property of the people who pay for it. They are paying still. Someone ought to leave a rug on the floor to remind the occupant.

Otherwise I can tell you how this ends, because I have lived it. The new thing is never finished. It will want a lawn to match it, and the lawn will want a square, and the square will want an arch, and an arch is already on the drawing board. One day the occupant will stand in a magnificent room that was to cost nothing, and wonder who it was that used to live there.

Editor’s note

Diderot’s original essay, Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre, ou avis à ceux qui ont plus de goût que de fortune, was written in 1768 and published in 1769. It is in the public domain and can be read in French at Project Gutenberg. An English translation by Mitchell Abidor is at marxists.org.

Sources

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