the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the prisoner's beard: "To whom have I the honour of speaking?" "I am, sir, the barber to the Bastille." "Gad, then, why don't you raze it?" In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded. DIDEROT. We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle keep, but in the château itself, which constituted a separate place of imprisonment. They placed in the château only prisoners guilty of minor offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on July 24, 1749. His last book, _Letters on the Blind for the Use of those Who Can See_, contained theories which appeared to have but little title to the description of "moral." But in the course of his examination he stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship of the _Thoughts of a Philosopher_ he had published some years before. The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all possible comforts--allowed to walk in the garden and park; "that the king's desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was engaged (the _Encyclopædia_), to permit him to communicate freely with persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family business." And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with her in the wood; Rousseau and D'Alembert spent their afternoons with him, and, as in the "good old days" of Plato and Socrates, our philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had undertaken the publication of the _Encyclopædia_ were, as we have seen, in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted little more than three months. THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.