of so great a work being very
expensive from Amsterdam by post, he, to whom all letters were free,
permitted these to be addressed to him, and sent them to me under the
countersign of the chancellor his father. When the work was printed he
did not permit the sale of it in the kingdom until, contrary to my wishes
an edition had been sold for my benefit. As the profit of this would on
my part have been a theft committed upon Rey, to whom I had sold the
manuscript, I not only refused to accept the present intended me, without
his consent, which he very generously gave, but persisted upon dividing
with him the hundred pistoles (a thousand livres--forty pounds), the
amount of it but of which he would not receive anything. For these
hundred pistoles I had the mortification, against which M. de Malesherbes
had not guarded me, of seeing my work horribly mutilated, and the sale of
the good edition stopped until the bad one was entirely disposed of.

I have always considered M. de Malesherbes as a man whose uprightness was
proof against every temptation. Nothing that has happened has even made
me doubt for a moment of his probity; but, as weak as he is polite, he
sometimes injures those he wishes to serve by the excess of his zeal to
preserve them from evil. He not only retrenched a hundred pages in the
edition of Paris, but he made another retrenchment, which no person but
the author could permit himself to do, in the copy of the good edition he
sent to Madam de Pompadour. It is somewhere said in that work that the
wife of a coal-heaver is more respectable than the mistress of a prince.
This phrase had occurred to me in the warmth of composition without any
application. In reading over the work I perceived it would be applied,
yet in consequence of the very imprudent maxim I had adopted of not
suppressing anything, on account of the application which might be made,
when my conscience bore witness to me that I had not made them at the
time I wrote, I determined not to expunge the phrase, and contented
myself with substituting the word Prince to King, which I had first
written. This softening did not seem sufficient to M. de Malesherbes: he
retrenched the whole expression in a new sheet which he had printed on
purpose and stuck in between the other with as much exactness as possible
in the copy of Madam de Pompadour. She was not ignorant of this
manoeuvre. Some good-natured people took the trouble to inform her of
it. Fo