manuscripts and proof-sheets to the flames.  One day, when the printing was nearly completed (1764), Diderot having occasion to consult an article under the letter S, found it entirely spoiled.  He stood confounded.  An instant’s thought revealed the printer’s atrocity.  He eagerly turned to the articles on which he and his subordinates had taken most pains, and found everywhere the same ravages and disorder.  “The discovery,” says Grimm, “threw him into a state of frenzy and despair which I shall never forget."[152] He wept tears of rage and torment in the presence of the criminal himself, and before wife and children and sympathising domestics.  For weeks he could neither eat nor sleep.  “For years,” he cried to Le Breton, “you have been basely cheating me.  You have massacred, or got a brute beast to massacre, the work of twenty good men who have devoted to you their time, their talents, their vigils, from love of right and truth, from the simple hope of seeing their ideas given to the public, and reaping from them a little consideration richly earned, which your injustice and thanklessness have now stolen from them for ever....  You and your book will be dragged through the mire; you will henceforth be cited as a man who has been guilty of an act of treachery, an act of vile hardihood, to which nothing that has ever happened in this world can be compared.  Then you will be able to judge your panic terror, and the cowardly counsels of those barbarous Ostrogoths and stupid Vandals who helped you in the havoc you have made."[153]

Yet he remained undaunted to the very last.  His first movement to throw up the work, and denounce Le Breton’s outrage to the subscribers and the world, was controlled.  His labour had lost its charm.  The monument was disfigured and defaced.  He never forgot the horrible chagrin, and he never forgave the ignoble author of it.  But the last stone was at length laid.  In 1765 the subscribers received the concluding ten volumes of letterpress.  The eleven volumes of plates were not completed until 1772.  The copies bore Neufchatel on the title-page, and were distributed privately.  The clergy in their assembly at once levelled a decree at the new book.  The parliament quashed this, not from love of the book, but from hatred of the clergy.  The government, however, ordered all who possessed the Encyclopaedia to deliver it over forthwith to the police.  Eventually the copies were returned to their owners with some petty curtailments.

Voltaire has left us a vivacious picture of authority in grave consultation over the great engine of destruction.  With that we may conclude our account of its strange eventful history.