biblical presentiment, says Michelet. "We
feel that he saw, beyond Rousseau, something sinister, a spectre of the
future. Diderot-Danton already looks in the face of
Rousseau-Robespierre."[147]

A more vexatious incident now befell the all-daring, all-enduring
Diderot, than either the decree of the Council or the schism of the
heresiarch at Montmorency. D'Alembert declared his intention of
abandoning the work, and urged his colleague to do the same. His letters
to Voltaire show intelligibly enough how he brought himself to this
resolution. "I am worn out," he says, "with the affronts and vexations
of every kind that this work draws down upon us. The hateful and even
infamous satires which they print against us, and which are not only
tolerated, but protected, authorised, applauded, nay, actually commanded
by the people with power in their hands; the sermons, or rather the
tocsins that are rung against us at Versailles in the presence of the
king, _nemine reclamante_; the new intolerable inquisition that they are
bent on practising against the Encyclopaedia, by giving us new censors
who are more absurd and more intractable than could be found at Goa;
all these reasons, joined to some others, drive me to give up this
accursed work once for all." He cared nothing for libels or stinging
pamphlets in themselves, but libels permitted or ordered by those who
could instantly have suppressed them, were a different thing, especially
when they vomited forth the vilest personalities. He admitted that there
were other reasons why he was bent on retiring, and it would appear that
one of these reasons was dissatisfaction with the financial arrangements
of the booksellers.[148]

Voltaire for some time remonstrated against this retreat before the
hated _Infame_. At length his opinion came round to D'Alembert's
reiterated assertions of the shame and baseness of men of letters
subjecting themselves to the humiliating yoke of ministers, priests, and
police. Voltaire wrote to Diderot, protesting that before all things it
was necessary to present a firm front to the foe; it would be atrocious
weakness to continue the work after D'Alembert had quitted it; it was
monstrous that such a genius as Diderot should make himself the slave of
booksellers and the victim of fanatics. Must this dictionary, he asked,
which is a hundred times more useful than Bayle's, be fettered with the
superstition which it should annihilate; must they make terms with