Modern editions are based on the complete manuscript in Diderot's own hand found by Georges Monval, the librarian at the Comédie-Française in 1890, while buying music scores from a second-hand bookshop in Paris.

[5] The recounted story takes place in the Café de la Régence, where Moi ("Me"), a narrator-like persona (often mistakenly supposed to stand for Diderot himself), describes for the reader a recent encounter he has had with the character Lui ("Him"), referring to—yet not literally meaning—Jean-François Rameau, the nephew of the famous composer,[6] who has engaged him in an intricate battle of wits, self-reflexivity, allegory and allusion.

[7] Recurring themes in the discussion include the Querelle des Bouffons (the French/Italian opera battle), education of children, the nature of genius and money.

In the prologue that precedes the conversation, the first-person narrator frames Lui as eccentric and extravagant, full of contradictions, "a mixture of the sublime and the base, of good sense and irrationality".

[8] Michel Foucault, in his Madness and Civilization, saw in the ridiculous figure of Rameau's nephew a kind of exemplar of a uniquely modern incarnation of the Buffoon.

The narrator has made his way to his usual haunt on a rainy day, the Café de la Régence, France's chess mecca, where he enjoys watching such masters as Philidor or Legall.

Such a man will draw my attention perhaps once a year when I meet him because his character offers a sharp contrast with the usual run of men, and a break from the dull routine imposed by one's education, social conventions and manners.

Society does not allow the talented to support themselves because it does not value them, leaving them to beg while the rich, the powerful and stupid poke fun at men like Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot.

[9] In Rameau's Nephew, Diderot attacked and ridiculed the critics of the Enlightenment, but he knew from past experience that some of his enemies were sufficiently powerful to have him arrested or the work banned.