PREFACE

bookseller, no brilliantly inspired philosopher, who conceived the idea of the Encyclopédie, but a powerful international organization able to employ the services of more men than all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication--struggling publishers, toiling littérateurs carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters" without the patronage of the great--which Lord Morley points out as "one of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopædia"--writers of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding or agreement," are all seen in reality to have been closely associated as "artisans of the