“This work, the most extensive and magnificent that ever was printed, is now in the press at Fort Kehl, near Strasburgh, a free place, subject to no restraint or imprimatur, and will be published towards the close of the present year. It will never be on sale. Subscribers only can have copies. Each set is to be numbered, and a particular number appropriated to each subscriber at the time of subscribing. As the sets to be worked off are limited to a fixed and small number, considering the great demand of all Europe, those who wish to be possessed of so valuable a work must be early in their application, lest they be shut out by the subscriptions being previously filled. Voltaire’s Manuscripts and Port-Folios, besides his Works already published, cost 12,000 guineas. This and other expenses attending the publication, will lay the Editors under an advance of £100,000 sterling. The public may from thence form a judgment of the extraordinary care that will be taken to make this edition a lasting monument of typographical elegance and grandeur,” etc. _June 4, 1782._ The “proposals” were accompanied by two pages of specimens of the type. Of this famous edition of _Voltaire_ an interesting account is given in Lomenie’s _Beaumarchais et ses Temps_.[584] The Society in whose name Beaumarchais undertook the work consisted of himself alone. Besides the Voltaire MSS. and the Baskerville types, he bought and set to work three paper-mills in the Vosges, and after much difficulty secured the old fort at Kehl as a neutral ground on which to establish in security his vast typographical undertaking. The enterprise was one involving labour, time and cost vastly beyond his expectations, and his correspondence with his manager at Kehl presents an almost pathetic picture of his efforts to grapple with the difficulties that beset his task. “How can we promise,” he wrote in 1780, “in the early months of {286} 1782 an edition which has neither hearth nor home in March 1780? The paper-mills have to be made, the type to be founded, the printing press to be put up, and the establishment to be formed.” And on another occasion he writes: “Here am I, obliged to learn my letters at paper-making, printing and bookselling.” It was not until 1784 that Volume One appeared; and the whole work in two editions was not completed till 1790,[585] by which time France was in the throes of the Revolution, and little likely to heed the literary exploits even of one of her most talented sons. Of the 15,000 copies printed, only 2,000 found subscribers; and after the dissolution of the establishment at Kehl[586] (where, besides, he printed an edition of _Rousseau_ and a few other works) all the benefit Beaumarchais received from his enterprise was a mountain of waste-paper.