and troubles. The world of authorship, though extremely noisy and
profoundly important, still made only a small group. One effect of a
censorship is to produce much gossip and whispering about suspected
productions before they see the light, and these whispers let the police
into as many secrets as they choose to know.

In Diderot's case, his unsuspecting good-nature to all comers made his
affairs accessible enough. His house was the resort of all the starving
hacks in Paris, and he has left us more than one graphic picture of the
literary drudge of that time. He writes, for instance, about a poor
devil to whom he had given a manuscript to copy. "The time for which he
had promised it to me expired, and as my man did not appear, I became
uneasy, and started in search of him. I found him in a hole about as big
as my fist, almost pitch-dark, without the smallest scrap of curtain or
hanging to cover the nakedness of his walls, a couple of straw-bottomed
chairs, a truckle-bed with a quilt riddled by the moths, a box in the
corner of the chimney and rags of every sort stuck upon it, a small tin
lamp to which a bottle served as support, and on a shelf some dozen
first-rate books. I sat talking there for three-quarters of an hour. My
man was as bare as a worm, lean, black, dry, but perfectly serene. He
said nothing, but munched his crust of bread with good appetite, and
bestowed a caress from time to time on his beloved, on the miserable
bedstead that took up two-thirds of his room. If I had never learnt
before that happiness resides in the soul, my Epictetus of Hyacinth
Street would have taught it me right thoroughly."[47]

The history of one of these ragged clients is to our point. "Among
those," he wrote to Madame Voland,[48] "whom chance and misery sent to
my address was one Glénat, who knew mathematics, wrote a good hand, and
was in want of bread. I did all I could to extricate him from his