9. Chanson’s career as a printer in Kehl was brief but dramatic. In March, 1781, he obtained a privilege to open a bookshop and ancillary printing press. He soon quarreled with Beaumarchais’ plenipotentiary, Le Tellier (for whom see our annotation to Besse’s letter of Aug. 1, above), and criticized him in a periodical he began to publish called L’Observateur. Chanson was also believed to have printed the bitter attack on Le Tellier and the Société littéraire et typographique written in the late fall of 1781 by Lamy, a defector from the Société who now worked for Chanson. Circulated under the title Lettre d’un Alsacien …, it criticized the Voltaire edition on almost every count: the typesetting was uneven, the ink was weak, the paper was poor, and the text was full of typographical errors. Beaumarchais received a copy of this diatribe in December, 1781; it provoked a scathing letter to Kehl. For his part, Le Tellier brought a successful lawsuit against Chanson, who was forced to leave the city. See P.H. Muir, “The Kehl Edition of Voltaire,” The Library, 5th ser., III (1948), 93–4; Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz, Beaumarchais et le Courier de l’Europe (2 vols., Oxford, 1990), II, 681–2.

To the best of our knowledge, BF never answered this letter. He did, however, give advice to one of the Société’s printers on how to improve the quality of their ink; see Jacque Besse’s letters of Aug. 1 and Sept. 5.