After his reply to Pere Berthier’s attack on the Prospectus, he received an anonymous letter to the effect that if he wished to avenge himself on the Jesuits, there were both important documents and money at his command.  Diderot replied that he was in no want of money, and that he had no time to spare for Jesuit documents.[132] He trusted to reason.  Neither reason nor eloquence availed against the credit at court of the ecclesiastical cabal.  The sale of the second volume of the Encyclopaedia was stopped by orders which Malesherbes was reluctantly compelled to issue.  A decree of the king’s council (Feb. 7, 1752) suppressed both volumes, as containing maxims hostile to the royal authority and to religion.  The publishers were forbidden to reprint them, and the booksellers were forbidden to deliver any copies that might still be in hand.  The decree, however, contained no prohibition of the continuance of the work.  It was probably not meant to do anything more serious than to pacify the Jesuits, and lend an apparent justification to the officious pastorals of the great prelates.  Some even thought that the aim of the government was to forestall severer proceedings on the part of the parliament of lawyers;[133] for corporations of lawyers have seldom been less bigoted or obstructive than corporations of churchmen.  Nor were lawyers and priests the only foes.  Even the base and despicable jealousies of booksellers counted for something in the storm.[134]

A curious triumph awaited the harassed Diderot.

He was compelled, under pain of a second incarceration, to hand over to the authorities all the papers, proof-sheets, and plates in his possession.  The Jesuit cabal supposed that if they could obtain the materials for the future volumes, they could easily arrange and manipulate them to suit their own purposes.  Their ignorance and presumption were speedily confounded.  In taking Diderot’s papers, they had forgotten, as Grimm says, to take his head and his genius:  they had forgotten to ask him for a key to articles which, so far from understanding, they with some confusion vainly strove even to decipher.  The government was obliged (May 1752) to appeal to Diderot and D’Alembert to resume a work for which their enemies had thus proved themselves incompetent.  Yet, by one of the meannesses of decaying authority, the decree of three months before was left suspended over their heads.[135]

The third volume of the Encyclopaedia appeared in the autumn of 1753.  D’Alembert prefixed an introduction, vindicating himself and his colleague with a manliness, a sincerity, a gravity, a fire, that are admirable and touching.  “What,” he concluded, “can malignity henceforth devise against two men of letters, trained long since by their meditations to fear neither injustice nor poverty; who having learnt by a long and mournful experience, not to despise, but to mistrust and dread men, have the courage to love them, and the prudence to flee