of one’s gifts, etcetera, etcetera.  Be useful to men!  Is it quite clear that one does more than amuse them, and that there is much difference between the philosopher and the flute-player?  They listen to one or the other with pleasure or disdain, and remain what they were.  The Athenians were never wickeder than in the time of Socrates, and perhaps all that they owe to his existence is a crime the more.  That there is more spleen than good sense in all this, I admit—­and back I go to the Encyclopaedia."[150]

Thus for seven years the labour of conducting the vast enterprise fell upon Diderot alone.  He had not only to write articles upon the most exhausting and various kinds of subjects; he had also to distribute topics among his writers, to shape their manuscripts, to correct proof-sheets, to supervise the preparation of the engravings, to write the text explanatory of them, and all this amid constant apprehension and alarm from the government and the police.  He would have been free from persecution at Lausanne or at Leyden.  The two great sovereigns of the north who thought it part of the trade of a king to patronise the new philosophy, offered him shelter at Petersburg or Berlin.[151]

But how could he transport to the banks of the Neva or the Spree his fifty skilled compositors, his crafty engravers on copper-plate, and all the host of his industrial army?  How could he find in those half-barbarous lands the looms and engines and thousand cunning implements and marvellous processes which he had under his eye and ready to his hand in France?  And so he held fast to his post on the fifth floor of the house in the Rue Saint Benoit, a standing marvel to the world of letters for all time.

As his toil was drawing to a close, he suddenly received the most mortifying of all the blows that were struck at him in the course of his prolonged, hazardous, and tormenting adventure.  After the interruption in 1759, it was resolved to bring out the ten volumes which were still wanting, in a single issue.  Le Breton was entrusted with the business of printing them.  The manuscript was set in type, Diderot corrected the proof-sheets, saw the revises, and returned each sheet duly marked with his signature for the press.  At this point the nefarious operation of Le Breton began.  He and his foreman took possession of the sheets, and proceeded to retrench, cut out, and suppress every passage, line, or phrase, that appeared to them to be likely to provoke clamour or the anger of the government.  They thus, of their own brute authority, reduced most of the best articles to the condition of fragments mutilated and despoiled of all that had been most valuable in them.  The miscreants did not even trouble themselves to secure any appearance of order or continuity in these mangled skeletons of articles.  Their murderous work done, they sent the pages to the press, and to make the mischief beyond remedy, they committed all the original