ed the printer's atrocity. He eagerly turned to
the articles on which he and his subordinates had taken most pains, and
found everywhere the same ravages and disorder. "The discovery," says
Grimm, "threw him into a state of frenzy and despair which I shall never
forget."[152] He wept tears of rage and torment in the presence of the
criminal himself, and before wife and children and sympathising
domestics. For weeks he could neither eat nor sleep. "For years," he
cried to Le Breton, "you have been basely cheating me. You have
massacred, or got a brute beast to massacre, the work of twenty good men
who have devoted to you their time, their talents, their vigils, from
love of right and truth, from the simple hope of seeing their ideas
given to the public, and reaping from them a little consideration richly
earned, which your injustice and thanklessness have now stolen from them
for ever.... You and your book will be dragged through the mire; you
will henceforth be cited as a man who has been guilty of an act of
treachery, an act of vile hardihood, to which nothing that has ever
happened in this world can be compared. Then you will be able to judge
your panic terror, and the cowardly counsels of those barbarous
Ostrogoths and stupid Vandals who helped you in the havoc you have
made."[153]

Yet he remained undaunted to the very last. His first movement to throw
up the work, and denounce Le Breton's outrage to the subscribers and the
world, was controlled. His labour had lost its charm. The monument was
disfigured and defaced. He never forgot the horrible chagrin, and he
never forgave the ignoble author of it. But the last stone was at length
laid. In 1765 the subscribers received the concluding ten volumes of
letterpress. The eleven volumes of plates were not completed until 1772.
The copies bore Neufchatel on the title-page, and were distributed
privately. The clergy in their assembly at once levelled a decree at the
new book. The parliament quashed this, not from love of the book, but
from hatred of the clergy. The government, however, ordered all who
possessed the Encyclopaedia to deliver it over forthwith to the police.
Eventually the copies were returned to their owners with some petty
curtailments.

Voltaire has left us a vivacious picture of authority in grave
consultation over the great engine of destruction. With that we may
conclude our account of its strange eventful history.

A servant of Lewis xv. told m