All this time they kept on turning over the leaves; and the Count de C——­ said aloud—­“Sire, how happy you are, that under your reign men should be found capable of understanding all the arts and transmitting them to posterity.  Everything is here, from the way to make a pin down to the art of casting and pointing your guns; from the infinitely little up to the infinitely great.  Thank God for having brought into the world in your kingdom the men who have done such good work for the whole universe.  Other nations must either buy the Encyclopaedia, or else they must pirate it.  Take all my property if you will, but give me back my Encyclopaedia.”

     “Yet they say,” replied the king, “that there are many faults
     in this work, necessary and admirable as it is.”

“Sire,” said the Count de C——­, “there were at your supper two ragouts which were failures; we left them uneaten, and yet we had excellent cheer.  Would you have had them throw all the supper out of the window because of those two ragouts?...”

Envy and Ignorance did not count themselves beaten; the two immortal sisters continued their cries, their cabals, their persecutions.  What happened?  Foreigners brought out four editions of this French book which in France was proscribed, and they gained about 1,800,000 crowns.[154]

In a monotonous world it is a pity to spoil a striking effect, yet one must be vigilant.  It has escaped the attention of writers who have reproduced this lively scene, that Madame de Pompadour was dead before the volumes containing Powder and Rouge were born.  The twenty-one volumes were not published until 1765, and she died in the spring of the previous year.  But the substance of the story is probably true, though Voltaire has only made a slip in a name.

As to the reference with which Voltaire impatiently concludes, we have to remember that the work was being printed at Geneva as it came out in Paris.  It was afterwards reprinted as a whole both at Geneva (1777) and at Lausanne (1778).  An edition appeared at Leghorn in 1770, and another at Lucca in 1771.  Immediately after the completion of the Encyclopaedia there began to appear volumes of selections from it.  The compilers of these anthologies (for instance of an Esprit de l’Encydopedie published at Geneva in 1768) were free from all intention of proselytising.  They meant only to turn a more or less honest penny by serving up in neat duodecimos the liveliest, most curious, and most amusing pieces to be found in the immense mass of the folios of the original.