vernment struck a blow at the very principle of literary property.
The King's Council conferred upon the descendants of La Fontaine the
exclusive privilege of publishing their ancestor's works. That is to
say, the Council took away without compensation from La Fontaine's
publishers a copyright for which they had paid in hard cash. The whole
corporation naturally rose in arms, and in due time the lieutenant of
police was obliged to take the whole matter into serious
consideration--whether the maintenance of the guild of publishers was
expedient; whether the royal privilege of publishing a book should be
regarded as conferring a definite and unassailable right of property in
the publication; whether the tacit permission to publish what it would
have been thought unbecoming to authorise expressly by royal sanction,
should not be granted liberally or even universally; and whether the old
restriction of the booksellers to one quarter of the town ought to
remain in force any longer. M. de Sartine invited Diderot to write him a
memorandum on the subject, and was disappointed to find Diderot
staunchly on the side of the booksellers (1767). He makes no secret,
indeed, that for his own part he would like to see the whole apparatus
of restraint abolished, but meanwhile he is strong for doing all that a
system of regulation, as opposed to a system of freedom, can do to make
the publication of books a source of prosperity to the bookseller, and
of cheap acquisition to the book-buyer. Above all things, Diderot is
vehemently in favour of the recognition of literary property, and
against such infringement of it as had been ventured upon in the case of
La Fontaine. He had no reason to be especially friendly to booksellers,
but for one thing, he saw that to nullify or to tamper with copyright
was in effect to prevent an author from having any commodity to sell,
and so to do him the most serious injury possible. And for another
thing, Diderot had equity and common sense enough to see that no
high-flown nonsense about the dignity of letters and the spiritual power
could touch the fact that a book is a piece of marketable ware, and that
the men who deal in such wares have as much claim to be protected in
their contracts as those who deal in any other wares.[242]

There is a vivid illustration of this unexpected business-like quality
in Diderot, in a conversation that he once had with D'Alembert. The
dialogue is interesting to those who happe