The Encyclopaedia of Diderot, though not itself the most prodigious achievement on which French booksellers may pride themselves, yet inspired that achievement.  In 1782 Panckoucke—­a familiar name in the correspondence of Voltaire and the Voltairean family—­conceived the plan of a Methodical Encyclopaedia.  This colossal work, which really consists of a collection of special cyclopaedias for each of the special sciences, was not completed until 1832, and comprises one hundred and sixty-six volumes of text, with a score more volumes of plates.  It has no unity of doctrine, no equal application of any set of philosophic principles, and no definite social aim.  The only encyclopaedia since 1772 with which I am acquainted, that is planned with a view to the presentation of a general body of doctrine, is the unfinished Encyclopedie Nuevelle of Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud.  This work was intended to apply the socialistic and spiritualistic ideas of its authors over the whole field of knowledge and speculation.  The result is that it furnishes only a series of dissertations, and is not an encyclopaedia in the ordinary sense.[155]

The booksellers at first spoke of the Encyclopaedia as an affair of two million livres.  It appeared, however that its cost did not go much beyond one million one hundred and forty thousand livres.  The gross return was calculated to be nearly twice as much.  The price to the subscriber of the seven volumes up to 1757, of the ten volumes issued in 1765, and of the eleven volumes of plates completed in 1772, amounted to nine hundred and eighty livres,[156] or about forty-three pounds sterling of that date, equivalent in value to more than three times the sum in money of to-day.

The payment received by Diderot is a little doubtful, and the terms were evidently changed from time to time.  His average salary, after D’Alembert had quitted him, seems to have amounted to about three thousand livres, or one hundred and thirty pounds sterling, per annum.  This coincides with Grimm’s statement that the total sum received by Diderot was sixty thousand livres, or about two thousand six hundred pounds sterling.[157] And to think, cried Voltaire, when he heard of Diderot’s humble wage, that an army contractor makes twenty thousand livres a day!  Voltaire himself had made a profit of more than half a million livres by a share in an army contract in the war of 1734, and his yearly income derived from such gains and their prudent investment was as high as seventy thousand livres, representing in value a sum not far short of ten thousand pounds a year of our present money.

II.