The history of one of these ragged clients is to our point.  “Among those,” he wrote to Madame Voland,[48] “whom chance and misery sent to my address was one Glenat, who knew mathematics, wrote a good hand, and was in want of bread.  I did all I could to extricate him from his embarrassments.  I went begging for customers for him on every side.  If he came at meal-times, I would not let him go; if he lacked shoes, I gave him them; now and then I slipped a shilling into his hands as well. he had the air of the worthiest man in the world, and he even bore his neediness with a certain gaiety that used to amuse me.  I was fond of chatting with him; he seemed to set little store by fortune, fame, and most of the other things that charm or dazzle us in life.  Seven or eight days ago Damilaville wrote to send this man to him, for one of his friends who had a manuscript for him to copy.  I send him; the manuscript is entrusted to him—­a work on religion and government.  I do not know how it came about, but that manuscript is now in the hands of the lieutenant of police.  Damilaville gives me word of this.  I hasten to my friend Glenat, to warn him to count no more upon me.  ’And why am I not to count upon you?’ ’Because you are a marked man.  The police have their eyes upon you and ‘tis impossible to send work to you.’  ’But, my dear sir, there’s no risk, so long as you entrust nothing reprehensible to my hands.  The police only come here when they scent game.  I cannot tell how they do it, but they are never mistaken.’  ’Ah well, I at any rate know how it is, and you have let me see much more in the matter than I ever expected to learn from you,’ and with that I turn my back on my rascal.”  Diderot having occasion to visit the lieutenant of police, introduced the matter, and could not withhold an energetic remonstrance against such an odious abuse of a man’s kindness of heart, as the introduction of spies to his fireside.  M. de Sartine laughed and Diderot took his leave, vowing that all the wretches who should come to him for the future, with cuffs dirty and torn, with holes in their stockings and holes in their shoes, with hair all unkempt, in shabby overcoats with many rents, or scanty black suits with starting seams, with all the tones and looks of distressed worth, would henceforth seem to him no better than police emissaries and scoundrels set to spy on him.  The vow, we may be sure, was soon forgotten, but the story shows how seriously in one respect the man of letters in France was worse off than his brother in England.

The world would have suffered no irreparable loss if the police had thrown the Sceptic’s Walk into the fire.  It is an allegory designed to contrast the life of religion, the life of philosophy, and the life of sensual pleasure.  Of all forms of composition, an allegory most depends for its success upon the rapidity of the writer’s eye for new felicities.  Accuracy, verisimilitude, sustention, count for nothing in comparison with imaginative adroitness