drive me to give up this accursed work once for all.”  He cared nothing for libels or stinging pamphlets in themselves, but libels permitted or ordered by those who could instantly have suppressed them, were a different thing, especially when they vomited forth the vilest personalities.  He admitted that there were other reasons why he was bent on retiring, and it would appear that one of these reasons was dissatisfaction with the financial arrangements of the booksellers.[148]

Voltaire for some time remonstrated against this retreat before the hated Infame.  At length his opinion came round to D’Alembert’s reiterated assertions of the shame and baseness of men of letters subjecting themselves to the humiliating yoke of ministers, priests, and police.  Voltaire wrote to Diderot, protesting that before all things it was necessary to present a firm front to the foe; it would be atrocious weakness to continue the work after D’Alembert had quitted it; it was monstrous that such a genius as Diderot should make himself the slave of booksellers and the victim of fanatics.  Must this dictionary, he asked, which is a hundred times more useful than Bayle’s, be fettered with the superstition which it should annihilate; must they make terms with scoundrels who keep terms with none; could the enemies of reason, the persecutors of philosophers, the assassins of our kings, still dare to lift up their voices in such a century as that?  “Men are on the eve of a great revolution in the human mind, and it is you to whom they are most of all indebted for it."[149]

More than once Voltaire entreated Diderot to finish his work in a foreign country where his hands would be free.  “No,” said Diderot in a reply of pathetic energy; “to abandon the work is turning our back upon the breach, and to do precisely what the villains who persecute us desire.  If you knew with what joy they have learnt D’Alembert’s desertion!  It is not for us to wait until the government have punished the brigands to whom they have given us up.  Is it for us to complain, when they associate with us in their insults men who are so much better than ever we shall be?  What ought we to do then?  Do what becomes men of courage,—­despise our foes, follow them up, and take advantage, as we have done, of the feebleness of our censors.  If D’Alembert resumes, and we complete our work, is not that vengeance enough?...  After all this, you will believe that I cling at any price to the Encyclopaedia, and you will be mistaken.  My dear master, I am over forty.  I am tired out with tricks and shufflings.  I cry from morning till night for rest, rest; and scarcely a day passes when I am not tempted to go and live in obscurity and die in peace in the depths of my old country.  There comes a time when all ashes are mingled.  Then what will it boot me to have been Voltaire or Diderot, or whether it is your three syllables or my three syllables that survive?  One must work, one must be useful, one owes an account