y, both public and
private. The Social Contract, printed over and over again in endless
editions, was sold for a shilling under the vestibule of the king's own
palace. When the police were in earnest, the hawker ran horrible risks,
as we saw a few pages further back; for these risks he recompensed
himself by his prices. A prohibition by the authorities would send a
book up within four-and-twenty hours from half a crown to a couple of
louis. This only increased the public curiosity, quickened the demand,
led to clandestine reprints, and extended the circulation of the book
that was nominally suppressed. When the condemnation of a book was cried
through the streets, the compositors said, "Good, another edition!"
There was no favour that an unknown author could have asked from the
magistrates so valuable to him as a little decree condemning his work to
be torn up and burnt at the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of
Justice.[241]

It was this practical impossibility of suppression that interested both
the guild of publishers and the government in the conditions of the book
trade. The former were always harassed, often kept poor, and sometimes
ruined, by systematic piracy and the invasion of their rights. The
government, on the other hand, could not help seeing that, as the books
could not possibly be kept out of the realm, it was to be regretted
that their production conferred no benefit on the manufacturing industry
of the realm, the composition, the printing, the casting of type, the
fabrication of paper, the preparation of leather and vellum, the making
of machines and tools. When Bayle's Dictionary appeared, it was the rage
of Europe. Hundreds of the ever-renowned folios found their way into
France, and were paid for by French money. The booksellers addressed the
minister, and easily persuaded him of the difference, according to the
economic light of those days, between an exchange of money against
paper, compared with an exchange of paper against paper. The minister
replied that this was true, but still that the gates of the kingdom
would never be opened to a single copy of Bayle. "The best thing to do,"
he said, "is to print it here." And the third edition of Bayle was
printed in France, much to the contentment of the French printers,
binders, and booksellers.

In 1761 the booksellers were afflicted by a new alarm. Foreign pirates
and domestic hawkers were doing them mischief enough. But in that year
the go