nters were limited
to thirty-six. Their privileges brought them little fortune. They were
of the lowest credit and repute, and most of them were hardly better
than beggars. It was said that not a dozen out of the three hundred and
sixty could afford to have more than one coat for his back. They were
bound hand and foot by vexatious rules, and their market was gradually
spoiled by a band of men whom they hated as interlopers, but whom the
public had some reason to bless. No bookseller nor printer could open an
establishment outside of the quarter of the University, or on the north
side of the bridges. The restriction, which was as old as the
introduction of printing into France, had its origin in the days when
the visits of the royal inspectors to the presses and bookshops were
constant and rigorous, and it saved the time of the officials to have
all their business close to their hand. Inasmuch, however, as people
insisted on having books, and as they did not always choose to be at the
pains of making a long journey to the region of the booksellers' shops,
hawkers sprang into existence. Men bought books or got them on credit
from the booksellers, and carried them in a bag over their shoulders to
the houses of likely customers, just as a peddler now carries laces and
calico, cheap silks and trumpory jewellery, round the country villages.
Even poor women filled their aprons with a few books, took them across
the bridges, and knocked at people's doors. This would have been well
enough in the eyes of the guild, if the hawkers had been content to buy
from the legally patented booksellers. But they began secretly to turn
publishers in a small way on their own account. Contraband was here, as
always, the natural substitute for free trade. They both issued pirated
editions of their own, and they became the great purchasers and
distributors of the pirated editions that came in vast bales from
Switzerland, from Holland, from the Pope's country of Avignon. To their
craft or courage the public owed its copies of works whose circulation
was forbidden by the government. The Persian Letters of Montesquieu was
a prohibited book, but, for all that, there were a hundred editions of
it before it had been published twenty years, and every schoolboy could
find a copy on the quays for a dozen halfpence. Bayle's Thoughts on the
Comet, Rousseau's Emilius and Heloisa, Helvetius's L'Esprit, and a
thousand other forbidden pieces were in every librar