on with the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in contraband dealings.  An author or a bookseller was forced to be as careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be in our own time.  He had to steer clear of the court, of the parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and places where they raise their masked heads,—­the bishops and ecclesiastics of every sort and condition.  Palissot produced his comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).  Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau’s marshal of Luxembourg, instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.[74] Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite detected a reference to Madame de Robecq.  Though dying, she still had relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind (1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine, really because he had given offence to D’Argenson’s mistress by hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on scientific experiment was of no value.[76]

The New Heloisa could not openly circulate in France so long as it contained the words, “I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner than the mistress of a king.”  The last word was altered to “prince,” and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti and Madame de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]

If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers.  They excused themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by the piracy of their brethren in trade.  But then they all pirated the works of one another.  The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.  He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers.  On the other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity, alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.  As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight,