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 scoundrels who keep terms with none; could the enemies of reason, the persecutors of philosophers, the assassins of our kings, still dare to lift up their voices in such a century as that?
"Men are on the eve of a great revolution in the human mind, and it is you to whom they are most of all indebted for it."[149] More than once Voltaire entreated Diderot to finish his work in a foreign country where his hands would be free.

"No," said Diderot in a reply of pathetic energy; "to abandon the work is turning our back upon the breach, and to do precisely what the villains who persecute us desire.

If you knew with what joy they have learnt D'Alembert's desertion! It is not for us to wait until the government have punished the brigands to whom they have given us up.