public and private.  The Social Contract, printed over and over again in endless editions, was sold for a shilling under the vestibule of the king’s own palace.  When the police were in earnest, the hawker ran horrible risks, as we saw a few pages further back; for these risks he recompensed himself by his prices.  A prohibition by the authorities would send a book up within four-and-twenty hours from half a crown to a couple of louis.  This only increased the public curiosity, quickened the demand, led to clandestine reprints, and extended the circulation of the book that was nominally suppressed.  When the condemnation of a book was cried through the streets, the compositors said, “Good, another edition!” There was no favour that an unknown author could have asked from the magistrates so valuable to him as a little decree condemning his work to be torn up and burnt at the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of Justice.[241]

It was this practical impossibility of suppression that interested both the guild of publishers and the government in the conditions of the book trade.  The former were always harassed, often kept poor, and sometimes ruined, by systematic piracy and the invasion of their rights.  The government, on the other hand, could not help seeing that, as the books could not possibly be kept out of the realm, it was to be regretted that their production conferred no benefit on the manufacturing industry of the realm, the composition, the printing, the casting of type, the fabrication of paper, the preparation of leather and vellum, the making of machines and tools.  When Bayle’s Dictionary appeared, it was the rage of Europe.  Hundreds of the ever-renowned folios found their way into France, and were paid for by French money.  The booksellers addressed the minister, and easily persuaded him of the difference, according to the economic light of those days, between an exchange of money against paper, compared with an exchange of paper against paper.  The minister replied that this was true, but still that the gates of the kingdom would never be opened to a single copy of Bayle.  “The best thing to do,” he said, “is to print it here.”  And the third edition of Bayle was printed in France, much to the contentment of the French printers, binders, and booksellers.

In 1761 the booksellers were afflicted by a new alarm.  Foreign pirates and domestic hawkers were doing them mischief enough.  But in that year the government struck a blow at the very principle of literary property.  The King’s Council conferred upon the descendants of La Fontaine the exclusive privilege of publishing their ancestor’s works.  That is to say, the Council took away without compensation from La Fontaine’s publishers a copyright for which they had paid in hard cash.  The whole corporation naturally rose in arms, and in due time the lieutenant of police was obliged to take the whole matter into serious consideration—­whether the maintenance