The lieutenant-general of police was the censor of the Press, which was more free-spoken than was pleasing to a despotic government, and often published matter that was deemed libellous. The French were not yet entirely cowed, and sometimes they dared to cry out against unjust judges and thieving financiers; there were fierce factions in the Church; Jesuit and Jansenist carried on a bitter polemical war; the Protestants, unceasingly persecuted, made open complaint which brought down on some of their exemplary clergy the penalty of the galleys. The police had complete authority over printers and publishers, and could deal sharply with all books, pamphlets, or papers containing libellous statements or improper opinions. The most stringent steps were taken to prevent the distribution of prohibited books. Philosophical works were most disliked. Books when seized were dealt with as criminals and were at once consigned to the Bastille. Twenty copies were set aside by the governor, other twelve or fifteen were at the disposal of the higher officials, the rest were handed over to the paper-makers to be torn up and sold as waste paper or destroyed by fire in the presence of the keeper of archives. Many of the books preserved in the Bastille and found at the Revolution were proved to be insignificant and inoffensive, and to have been condemned on the general charge of being libels either on the queen and royal family or on the Ministers of State. Prohibited books were not imprisoned until they had been tried and condemned; their sentence was written on a ticket affixed to the sack containing them. Condemned engravings were scratched and defaced in the presence of the keeper of archives and the staff of the Bastille; and so wholesale was the destruction of books that one paper-maker alone carried off 3,015 pounds weight of fragments. Seizures were often accompanied by the arrest of printers and publishers, and an order to destroy the press and distribute the bookseller's whole stock. [Illustration: LOUIS XIV. (_From an old Print._)] Although la Reynie used every effort to check improper publications, he was known as the patron and supporter of legitimate printing. Under his auspices several notable editions issued from the press, and their printers received handsome pensions from the State. He was a collector, a bibliophile who gathered together many original texts; and he will always deserve credit for having caused the chief manuscripts of the great dramatist Molière to be carefully preserved.