and his
colleague with a manliness, a sincerity, a gravity, a fire, that are
admirable and touching. "What," he concluded, "can malignity henceforth
devise against two men of letters, trained long since by their
meditations to fear neither injustice nor poverty; who having learnt by
a long and mournful experience, not to despise, but to mistrust and
dread men, have the courage to love them, and the prudence to flee
them?... After having been the stormy and painful occupation of the
most precious years of our life, this work will perhaps be the solace of
its close. May it, when both we and our enemies alike have ceased to
exist, be a durable monument of the good intention of the one, and the
injustice of the other.... Let us remember the fable of Bocalina: 'A
traveller was disturbed by the importunate chirrupings of the
grasshoppers; he would fain have slain them every one, but only got
belated and missed his way; he need only have fared peacefully on his
road, and the grasshoppers would have died of themselves before the end
of a week.'"[136] A volume was now produced in each year, until the
autumn of 1757 and the issue of the seventh volume. This brought the
work down to Gyromancy and Gythiuin. Then there arose storms and
divisions which marked a memorable epoch alike in the history of the
book, in the life of Diderot and others, and in the thought of the
century. The progress of the work in popularity during the five years
between 1752 and 1757 had been steady and unbroken. The original
subscribers were barely two thousand. When the fourth volume appeared,
there were three thousand. The seventh volume found nearly a thousand
more.[137] Such prodigious success wrought the chagrin of the party of
superstition to fever heat. As each annual volume came from the press
and found a wider circle of readers than its predecessor, their malice
and irritation waxed a degree more intense. They scattered malignant
rumours abroad; they showered pamphlets; no imputation was too odious or
too ridiculous for them. Diderot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Buffon, were declared to have organised a league of writers, with the
deliberate purpose of attacking the public tranquillity and overthrowing
society. They were denounced as heads of a formal conspiracy, a
clandestine association, a midnight band, united in a horrible community
of pestilent opinions and sombre interests.

In the seventh volume an article appeared which made the fermen