me de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without
more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish
mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge
of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]

If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the
eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality
was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the
police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused
themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they
were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by
the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the
works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and
chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.
He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and
piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the
other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.
As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving
and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish
that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of
them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in
connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,
self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human
emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian
factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to
their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the
philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they
endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any
hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
always be capable of doing.

Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it
in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press
of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of
Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember
the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in
Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth
century, as well as the s