{London,] 7 October 1876 
My dear Friend, 

I have just received a letter from Paris (from an employee* at 
Lachatre’s booksellers) from which it transpires that the banning 
of Capital’ is simply a myth, a myth, moreover, assiduously 
disseminated by the police and by Mr Quést himself, the judicial 
administrator appointed by the Jate Buffet as sequestrator of 
Lachatre’s booksellers.” 

Because it had been published under the state of siege, 
Capital—now that the state of siege has been raised—could only 
be banned by the regular courts, and the authorities fear a scandal 
of this kind. So they are seeking to suppress the book by 
underhand methods of intrigue. 

You would greatly oblige me by advising me of the contents of 
the letter in which your agent Guyot mentions the banning of the 
book.. Kovalevsky, for his part, has Russian friends in Paris 
prepared to attest that even Lachatre’s booksellers has refused to 
sell them the work. 

Armed with these proofs I shall be able to threaten Mr 
Quést—a great miser, albeit a millionaire—with legal. proceedings 
and a demand for damages and interest. It is only through the 
force of such threats that he has finally ordered the printing of 
the last fifteen instalments. Under French law he is, vis-a-vis 
myself, merely Mr Lachatre’s representative, his deputy, and must 
fulfil all the conditions laid down in my contract with the latter. 

Last September’s Revue des deux Mondes contains a so-called 
critique of Capital by Mr Laveleye.* Only by reading it can one get 
any idea of the idiocy of our bourgeois ‘thinkers’. Mr Laveleye is, 
however, naive enough to admit that, once you accept the 
doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo or even— horribile dictu'— 
those of the Careys and the Bastiats, there is no means of escaping 
the subversive doctrines of Capital. 

@ presumably from Henri Oriol - > the French edition of the first volume of 
Capital - © See this volume, p. 440. - 4 Ibid., p. 92. - © E. de Laveleye, ‘Le socialisme 
contemporain en Allemagne, I. Les théoriciens’, Revue des deux Mondes, Vol. 17, Paris, 
1876. - f dreadful to relate 

I congratulate you on your LEADING article in Bnepeds! on 
Pan-Slav lyricism in Russia.” It is not only a masterpiece, it is above 
all a great act of moral courage. 

Yours ever, 

Karl Marx 
How is Smirnov’s health progressing?