narrator refers derisively to sentimental novels and calls attention to the ways in which events develop more realistically in his book. At other times, the narrator tires of the tedium of narration altogether and obliges the reader to supply certain trivial details. Literary significance and criticism The critical reception of the book has been mixed. French critics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dismissed it as derivative of Rabelais and Laurence Sterne, as well as unnecessarily bawdy. It made a better impression on the German Romantics, who had had the opportunity to read it before their French counterparts did. Schiller held it in high regard and recommended it strongly to Goethe, who read Jacques in a single sitting. Friedrich Schlegel referred to it positively in his critical fragments (3, 15) and in the Athenaeum fragments (201). It formed something of an ideal of Schlegel's concept of wit. Stendhal, while acknowledging flaws in Jacques, nevertheless considered it a superior and exemplary work. In the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Spitzer and J. Robert Loy tended to see Jacques as a key work in the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais, focused on celebrating diversity rather than providing clear answers to philosophical problems. English translations Anonymous: James the Fatalist and His Master (G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797, London) J. Robert Loy: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (NYU Press, 1959; revised 1962) Wesley D. Camp and Agnes G. Raymond: Jack the Fatalist and His Master (American University Studies, 1984) Michael Henry: Jacques the Fatalist (Penguin, 1986) David Coward: Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford University Press, 1999) Adaptations Jacques le Fataliste is the most commonly adapted of Diderot's works. Robert Bresson adapted a self-contained anecdote, the story of Madame de La Pommeraye, from Jacques le fataliste for his film Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945). The dialogue for the film was written by Jean Cocteau. The same episode was the basis of Fritz Wendhausen's film Madame de La Pommeraye's Intrigues (1922). The story was adapted again for film in Emmanuel Mouret's Mademoiselle de Joncquières (2018). Milan Kundera based a play on the novel in 1971, writing in French and using the novel's title, published in an English translation under the title Jacques and His Master: An Homage to Diderot in Three Acts. In his essay The Art of the Novel, Kundera argues that Jacques le Fataliste is one of the