favors which he had long refused.  The disgust he experienced at Paris
through his insatiable vanity made him determine upon seeking another
arena; after having accepted a pension and a place from the King of
Prussia, Voltaire set out for Berlin.

But lately allied to France, to which he was ere long to deal such heavy
blows, Frederick II. was French by inclination, in literature and in
philosophy; he was a bad German scholar; he always wrote and spoke in
French, and his court was the resort of the cultivated French wits too
bold in their views to live in peace at Paris.  Maupertuis, La Mettrie,
and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin.  He was
received there with enthusiasm and as sovereign of the little court of
philosophers.  "A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers," he
wrote in a letter to Paris, "no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy,
poetry, a hero who is a philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces,
grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, Plato's symposium, society
and freedom!  Who would believe it?  It is all true, however!"  Voltaire
found his duties as chamberlain very light.  "It is Caesar, it is Marcus
Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe Chaulieu, with whom I sup;
there is the charm of retirement, there is the freedom of the country,
with all those little delights of life which a lord of a castle who is a
king can procure for his very obedient humble servants and guests.  My
own duties are to do nothing.  I enjoy my leisure.  I give an hour a day
to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I
am his grammarian, not his chamberlain.  The rest of the day is my own,
and the evening ends with a pleasant supper.  .  .  .  Never in any place
in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions
of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt.  God
is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are treated
unsparingly."

The coarseness of the Germans and the mocking infidelity of the French
vied with each other in license.  Sometimes Voltaire felt that things
were carried rather far.  "Here be we, three or four foreigners, like
monks in an abbey," he wrote; "please God the father abbot may content
himself with making fun of us."

Literary or philosophical questions already gave rise sometimes to
disagreements.  "I am at present correcting the second edition which the
King of Prussia is going to publish of the history of his country," wrote
Voltaire; "fancy! in order to appear more impartial, he falls tooth and
nail on his grandfather.  I have lightened the blows as much as I could.
I rather like this grandfather, because he displayed magnificence, and
has left some fine monuments.  I had great trouble about softening down
the terms in which the grandson reproaches his ancestor for his vanity in
having got himself made a king; it is a vanity from which his descendants
derive pretty solid advantages, and the title is not at all a
disagreeable one.  At last I said to him, 'It is your grandfather, it is
not mine; do what you please with him,' and I confined myself to weeding
the expressions."

Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor,
a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with
Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin.
"Maupertuis has not easygoing springs," the poet wrote to his niece; "he
takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant.  It is said that a little
envy enters into his calculations."  Already Voltaire's touchy vanity was
shying at the rivals he encountered in the king's favor.  "So it is
known, then, by this time at Paris, my dear child," he writes to his
niece, "that we have played the Mort de Cesar at Potsdam, that Prince
Henry is a good actor, has no accent, and is very amiable, and that this
is the place for pleasure?  All that is true .  .  .  but .  .  .  The
king's supper-parties are delightful; at them people talk reason, wit,
science; freedom prevails thereat; he is the soul of it all; no ill
temper, no clouds, at any rate no storms; my life is free and well
occupied .  .  .  but .  .  .  Opera, plays, carousals, suppers at Sans-
Souci, military manoeuvres, concerts, studies, readings .  .  but .  .
The city of Berlin, grand, better laid out than Paris; palaces,
play-houses, affable parish priests, charming princesses, maids of honor
beautiful and well made; the mansion of Madame de Tyrconnel always full,
and sometimes too much so .  .  .  but .  .  .  but.  .  .  .  My dear
child, the weather is beginning to settle down into a fine frost."

The "frost" not only affected Voltaire's relations with his brethren in
philosophy, it reached even to the king himself.  A far from creditable
lawsuit with a Jew completed Frederick's irritation.  He forbade the poet
to appear in his presence before the affair was over.  "Brother Voltaire
is doing penance here," wrote the latter to the Margravine of Baireuth,
the King of Prussia's amiable sister he has a beast of a lawsuit with a
Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, there will be
something more to pay for having been robbed. . . ."  Frederick, on his
side, writes to his sister, "You ask me what the lawsuit is in which
Voltaire is involved with a Jew.  It is a case of a rogue wanting to
cheat a thief.  It is intolerable that a man of Voltaire's intellect
should make so unworthy an abuse of it.  The affair is in the hands of
justice; and, in a few days, we shall know from the sentence which is the
greater rogue of the two.  Voltaire lost his temper, flew in the Jew's
face, and, in fact, behaved like a madman.  I am waiting for this affair
to be over to put his head under the pump or reprimand him severely (_lui
laver la tete_), and see whether, at the age of fifty-six, one cannot
make him, if not reasonable, at any rate less of a rogue."

Voltaire settled matters with the Jew, at the same time asking the king's
pardon for what he called his giddiness.  "This great poet is always
astride of Parnassus and Rue Quincampoix," said the Marquis of Argenson.
Frederick had written him on the 24th of February, 1751, a severe letter,
the prelude and precursor of the storms which were to break off before
long the intimacy between the king and the philosopher.  "I was very glad
to receive you," said the king; "I esteemed your wit, your talents, your
acquirements, and I was bound to suppose that a man of your age, tired of
wrangling with authors and exposing himself to tempests, was coming
hither to take refuge as in a quiet harbor; but you at the very first, in
a rather singular fashion, required of me that I should not engage
Frerron to write me news.  D'Arnauld did you some injuries; a generous
man would have pardoned them; a vindictive man persecutes those towards
whom he feels hatred.  In fine, though D'Arnauld had done nothing so far
as I was concerned, on your account he had to leave.  You went to the
Russian minister's to speak to him about matters you had no business to
meddle with, and it was supposed that I had given you instructions; you
meddled in Madame de Bentinck's affairs, which was certainly not in your
province.  Then you have the most ridiculous squabble in the world with
that Jew.  You created a fearful uproar all through the city.  The matter
of the Saxon bills is so well known in Saxony that grave complaints have
been made to me about them.  For my part, I kept peace in my household
until your arrival, and I warn you that, if you are fond of intrigue and
cabal, you have come to the wrong place.  I like quiet and peaceable
folks who do not introduce into their behavior the violent passions of
tragedy; in case you can make up your mind to live as a philosopher, I
shall be very glad to see you; but, if you give way to the impetuosity of
your feelings and quarrel with everybody, you will do me no pleasure by
coming hither and you may just as well remain at Berlin."

Voltaire was not proud; he readily heaped apology upon apology; but he
was irritable and vain; his ill-humor against Maupertuis came out in a
pamphlet, as bitter as it was witty, entitled _La Diatribe du Docteur
Akakia;_ copies were circulating in Berlin; the satire was already
printed anonymously, when the Great Frederick suddenly entered the lists.
He wrote to Voltaire, "Your effrontery astounds me after that which you
have just done, and which is as clear as daylight.  Do not suppose that
you will make black appear white; when one does not see, it is because
one does not want to see everything; but, if you carry matters to
extremity, I will have everything printed, and it will then be seen that
if your works deserve that statues should be raised to you, your conduct
deserves handcuffs."

Voltaire, affrighted, still protesting his innocence, at last gave up the
whole edition of the diatribe, which was burned before his eyes in the
king's own closet.  According to the poet's wily habit, some copy or
other had doubtless escaped the flames.  Before long _Le Docteur Akakia_
appeared at Berlin, arriving modestly from Dresden by post; people fought
for the pamphlet, and everybody laughed; the satire was spread over all
Europe.  In vain did Frederick have it burned on the Place d'Armes by the
hands of the common hangman; he could not assuage the despair of
Maupertuis.  "To speak to you frankly," the king at last wrote to the
disconsolate president, "it seems to me that you take too much to heart,
both for an invalid and a philosopher, an affair which you ought to
despise.  How prevent a man from writing, and how prevent him from
denying all the impertinences he has uttered?  I made investigations to
find out whether any fresh satires had been sold at Berlin, but I heard
of none; as for what is sold in Paris, you are quite aware that I have
not charge of the police of that city, and that I am not master of it.
Voltaire treats you more gently than I am treated by the gazetteers of
Cologne and Lubeck, and yet I don't trouble myself about it."

Voltaire could no longer live at Potsdam or at Sans-Souci; even Berlin
seemed dangerous: in a fit of that incurable perturbation which formed
the basis of his character and made him commit so many errors, he had no
longer any wish but to leave Prussia, only he wanted to go without
embroiling himself with the king.  "I sent the Solomon of the North," he
writes to Madame Denis on the 13th of January, 1753, "for his present,
the cap and bells he gave me, with which you reproached me so much.  I
wrote him a very respectful letter, for I asked him for leave to go.
What do you think he did?  He sent me his great factotum Federshoff, who
brought me back my toys; he wrote me a letter saying that he would rather
have me to live with than Maupertuis.  What is quite certain is, that I
would rather not live with either one or the other."

Frederick was vexed with Voltaire; he nevertheless found it difficult to
give up the dazzling charm of his conversation.  Voltaire was hurt and
disquieted; he wanted to get away--the king, however, exercised a strong
attraction over him.  But in spite of mutual coquetting, making up, and
protesting, the hour of separation was at hand; the poet was under
pressure from his friends in France; in Berlin he had never completely
neglected Paris.  He had just published his _Siecle de Louis XIV.;_ he
flattered himself with the hope that he might again appear at court,
though the king had disposed of his place as historiographer in favor of
Duclos.  Frederick at last yielded; he was on the parade, Voltaire
appeared there.  "Ah!  Monsieur Voltaire," said the king, "so you really
intend to go away?"  "Sir, urgent private affairs, and especially my
health, leave me no alternative."  "Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant
journey."  Voltaire jumped into his carriage, and hurried to Leipsic; he
thought himself free forever from the exactions and tyrannies of the King
of Prussia.

The poet, according to his custom, had tarried on the way.  He had passed
more than a month at Gotha, being overwhelmed with attentions by the
duke, and by the duchess, for whom he wrote the dry chronicle entitled
_Les Annales de L'Empire_.  He arrived at Frankfort on the 31st of May
only: the king's orders had arrived before him.

"Here is how this fine adventure came to pass," says Voltaire.  "There
was at Frankfort one Freytag, who had been banished from Dresden, and had
become an agent for the King of Prussia.  .  .  .  He notified me on
behalf of his Majesty that I was not to leave Frankfort till I had
restored the valuable effects I was carrying away from his Majesty.
'Alack! sir, I am carrying away nothing from that country, if you please,
not even the smallest regret.  What, pray, are those jewels of the
Brandenburg crown that you require?'  'It be, sir,' replied Freytag,
'the work of poesy of the king, my gracious master.'  'O!  I will give
him back his prose and verse with all my heart,' replied I, 'though,
after all, I have more than one right to the work.  He made me a present
of a beautiful copy printed at his expense.  Unfortunately this copy is
at Leipsic with my other luggage.'  Then Freytag proposed to me to remain
at Frankfort until the treasure which was at Leipsic should have arrived;
and he signed an order for it."

The volume which Frederick claimed, and which he considered it of so much
importance to preserve from Voltaire's indiscretions, contained amongst
other things a burlesque and licentious poem, entitled the Palladium,
wherein the king scoffed at everything and everybody in terms which he
did not care to make public.  He knew the reckless malignity of the poet
who was leaving him, and he had a right to be suspicious of it; but
nothing can excuse the severity of his express orders, and still less the
brutality of his agents.  The package had arrived; Voltaire, agitated,
anxious, and ill, wanted to get away as soon as possible, accompanied by
Madame Denis, who had just joined him.  Freytag had no orders, and
refused to let him go; the prisoner loses his head, he makes up his mind
to escape at any price, he slips from the hotel, he thinks he is free,
but the police of Frankfort was well managed.  "The moment I was off, I
was arrested, I, my secretary and my people; my niece is arrested; four
soldiers drag her through the mud to a cheese-monger's named Smith, who
had some title or other of privy councillor to the King of Prussia; my
niece had a passport from the King of France, and, what is more, she had
never corrected the King of Prussia's verses.  They huddled us all into a
sort of hostelry, at the door of which were posted a dozen soldiers; we
were for twelve days prisoners of war, and we had to pay a hundred and
forty crowns a day."

[Illustration: Arrest of Voltaire----298]

The wrath and disquietude of Voltaire no longer knew any bounds; Madame
Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter upon letter to
Voltaire's friends at the court of Prussia; she wrote to the king
himself.  The strife which had begun between the poet and the maladroit
agents of the Great Frederick was becoming serious.  "We would have
risked our lives rather than let him get away," said Freytag; "and if I,
holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier,
but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don't know
that I shouldn't have lodged a bullet in his head.  To such a degree had
I at heart the letters and writings of the king."

Freytag's zeal received a cruel rebuff: orders arrived to let the poet
go.  "I gave you no orders like that," wrote Frederick, "you should never
make more noise than a thing deserves.  I wanted Voltaire to give up to
you the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him;,
as soon as all that was given up to you I can't see what earthly reason
could have induced you to make this uproar."  At last, on the 6th of
July, "all this affair of Ostrogoths and Vandals being over," Voltaire
left Frankfort precipitately.  His niece had taken the road to Paris,
whence she soon wrote to him, "There is nobody in France, I say nobody
without exception, who has not condemned this violence mingled with so
much that is ridiculous and cruel; it makes a deeper impression than you
would believe.  Everybody says that you could not do otherwise than you
are doing, in resolving to meet with philosophy things so
unphilosophical.  We shall do very well to hold our tongues; the public
speaks quite enough." Voltaire held his tongue, according to his idea of
holding his tongue, drawing, in his poem of _La Loi naturelle,_ dedicated
at first to the margravine of Baireuth and afterwards to the Duchess of
Saxe-Gotha, a portrait of Frederick which was truthful and at the same
time bitter:

"Of incongruities a monstrous pile,
Calling men brothers, crushing them the while;
With air humane, a misanthropic brute;
Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-'cute;
Weak 'midst his choler, modest in his pride;
Yearning for virtue, lust personified;
Statesman and author, of the slippery crew;
My patron, pupil, persecutor too."

Voltaire's intimacy with the Great Frederick was destroyed it had for a
while done honor to both of them; it had ended by betraying the
pettinesses and the meannesses natural to the king as well as to the
poet.  Frederick did not remain without anxiety on the score of
Voltaire's rancor; Voltaire dreaded nasty diplomatic proceedings on the
part of the king; he had been threatened with as much by Lord Keith,
Milord Marechal, as he was called on the Continent from the hereditary
title he had lost in his own country through his attachment to the cause
of the Stuarts:--


"Let us see in what countries M. de Voltaire has not had some squabble or
made himself many enemies," said a letter to Madame Denis from the great
Scotch lord, when he had entered Frederick's service: "every country
where the Inquisition prevails must be mistrusted by him; he would put
his foot in it sooner or later.  The Mussulmans must be as little pleased
with his Mahomet as good Christians were.  He is too old to go to China
and turn mandarin; in a word, if he is wise, there is no place but France
for him.  He has friends there, and you will have him with you for the
rest of his days; do not let him shut himself out from the pleasure of
returning thither, for you are quite aware that, if he were to indulge in
speech and epigrams offensive to the king my master, a word which the
latter might order me to speak to the court of France would suffice to
prevent M. de Voltaire from returning, and he would be sorry for it when
it was too late."

Voltaire was already in France, but he dared not venture to Paris.
Mutilated, clumsy, or treacherous issues of the _Abrege de l'Histoire
Universelle_ had already stirred the bile of the clergy; there were to be
seen in circulation copies of _La Pucelle,_ a disgusting poem which the
author had been keeping back and bringing out alternately for several
years past.  Voltaire fled from Colmar, where the Jesuits held sway, to
Lyons, where he found Marshal Richelieu, but lately his protector and
always his friend, who was repairing to his government of Languedoc.
Cardinal Tencin refused to receive the poet, who regarded this sudden
severity as a sign of the feelings of the court towards him.  "The king
told Madame de Pompadour that he did not want me to go to Paris; I am of
his Majesty's opinion, I don't want to go to Paris," wrote Voltaire to
the Marquis of Paulmy.  He took fright and sought refuge in Switzerland,
where he soon settled on the Lake of Geneva, pending his purchase of the
estate of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy.
He was henceforth fixed, free to pass from France to Switzerland and from
Switzerland to France.  "I lean my left on Mount Jura," he used to say,
"my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front
of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of
Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling
thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings.  Philosophers
should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds
that run them down."

The perturbation of Voltaire's soul and mind was never stilled; the
anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided;
he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought
he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but
lately been often cloaked according to circumstances.  He had taken the
communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the
rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at
Delices he worked at the _Encyclopcedia,_ which was then being commenced
by D'Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the
religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the
pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church.  "I assure
you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink
the cup to the very lees," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert.  In the great
campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire,
so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it
is he who shouts to Diderot, "Squelch the thing (_Ecrasez l'infame_)!"
The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march
out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and
free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia,
Voltaire marches with them.

The _Essai sur l'Histoire generale et les Moeurs_ was one of the first
broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade.  "Voltaire will never
write a good history," Montesquieu used to say: "he is like the monks,
who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory
of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent."  The same intention
betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the
hermitage of Delices, the poem on _Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne,_
the drama of _Socrate,_ the satire of the _Pauvre Diable,_ the sad story
of _Candide,_ led the way to a series of publications every day more and
more violent against the Christian faith.  The tragedy of _L' Orphelin de
la Chine_ and that of _Tancrede,_ the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc
de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the
devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of
philosophers.  Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to
building, planting, farming.  He established round his castle a small
industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market
everywhere.  "Our design," he used to say, "is to ruin the trade of
Geneva in a pious spirit."  Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously
attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle's pieces on a stage
which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much
disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau.  It was
on account of Voltaire's theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote
his _Lettre centre les Spectacles_.  "I love you not, sir," wrote
Rousseau to Voltaire: "you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to
touch me most deeply.  You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum
you have found there."  Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long,
and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity
so opposed to his general and avowed principles.  Voltaire was angry with
Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he
was, as usual, hurried away by the passion of the moment, when he wrote,
speaking of the exile, "I give you my word that if this blackguard
(_polisson_) of a Jean Jacques should dream of coming (to Geneva), he
would run great risk of mounting a ladder which would not be that of
Fortune."  At the very same time Rousseau was saying, "What have I done
to bring upon myself the persecution of M. de Voltaire?  And what worse
have I to fear from him?  Would M. de Buffon have me soften this tiger
thirsting for my blood?  He knows very well that nothing ever appeases or
softens the fury of tigers; if I were to crawl upon the ground before
Voltaire, he would triumph thereat, no doubt, but he would rend me none
the less.  Basenesses would dishonor me, but would not save me.  Sir, I
can suffer, I hope to learn how to die, and he who knows how to do that
has never need to be a dastard."

Rousseau was high-flown and tragic; Voltaire was cruel in his
contemptuous levity; but the contrast between the two philosophers was
even greater in the depths of them than on.  the surface.  Rousseau took
his own words seriously, even when he was mad, and his conduct was sure
to belie them before long.  He was the precursor of an impassioned and
serious age, going to extremes in idea and placing deeds after words.
In spite of occasional reticence dictated by sound sense, Voltaire had
abandoned himself entirely in his old age to that school of philosophy,
young, ardent, full of hope and illusions, which would fain pull down
everything before it knew what it could set up, and the actions of which
were not always in accordance with principles.  "The men were inferior to
their ideas."  President De Brosses was justified in writing to Voltaire,
"I only wish you had in your heart a half-quarter of the morality and
philosophy contained in your works."  Deprived of the counterpoise of
political liberty, the emancipation of thought in the reign of Louis XV.
had become at one and the same time a danger and a source of profound
illusions; people thought that they did what they said, and that they
meant what they wrote, but the time of actions and consequences had not
yet come; Voltaire applauded the severities against Rousseau, and still
he was quite ready to offer him an asylum at Ferney; he wrote to
D'Alembert, "I am engaged in sending a priest to the galleys," at the
very moment when he was bringing eternal honor to his name by the
generous zeal which led him to protect the memory and the family of the
unfortunate people named Calas.

The glorious and bloody annals of the French Reformation had passed
through various phases; liberty, always precarious, even under Henry IV.,
and whilst the Edict of Nantes was in force, and legally destroyed by its
revocation, had been succeeded by periods of assuagement and comparative
repose; in the latter part of Louis XV.'s reign, about 1760, fresh
severities had come to overwhelm the Protestants.  Modestly going about
their business, silent and timid, as inviolably attached to the king as
to their hereditary creed, several of them had undergone capital
punishment.  John Calas, accused of murdering his son, had been broken on
the wheel at Toulouse; the reformers had been accustomed to these sombre
dramas, but the spirit of the times had marched onward; ideas of justice,
humanity, and liberty, sown broadcast by the philosophers, more imbued
than they were themselves aware of with the holy influences of
Christianity, had slowly and secretly acted upon men's minds; executions
which had been so frequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
caused trouble and dismay in the eighteenth: in vain did the fanatical
passions of the populace of Toulouse find an echo in the magistracy of
that city: it was no longer considered a matter of course that
Protestants should be guilty of every crime, and that those who were
accused should not be at liberty to clear themselves.  The philosophers
had at first hesitated.  Voltaire wrote to Cardinal Bernis, "Might I
venture to entreat your eminence to be kind enough to tell me what I am
to think about the frightful case of this Calas, broken on the wheel at
Toulouse, on a charge of having hanged his own son?  The fact is, they
maintain here that he is quite innocent, and that he called God to
witness it. . . .  This case touches me to the heart; it saddens my
pleasures, it taints them.  Either the Parliament of Toulouse or the
Protestants must be regarded with eyes of horror."  Being soon convinced
that the Parliament deserved all his indignation, Voltaire did not grudge
time, efforts, or influence in order to be of service to the unfortunate
remnant of the Calas family.  "I ought to look upon myself as in some
sort a witness," he writes: "several months ago Peter Calas, who is
accused of having assisted his father and mother in a murder, was in my
neighborhood with another of his brothers.  I have wavered a long while
as to the innocence of this family; I could not believe that any judges
would have condemned to a fearful death an innocent father of a family.
There is nothing I have not done to enlighten myself as to the truth.  I
dare to say that I am as sure of the innocence of this family as I am of
my own existence."

For three years, with a constancy which he often managed to conceal
beneath an appearance of levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing
the Calas.  "It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate
family," said Diderot to Mdlle.  Voland: "O, my friend, what a noble work
for genius!  This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice
must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue.  Why, what are
the Calas to him?  What can awaken his interest in them?  What reason has
he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?"
From the borders of the Lake of Geneva, from his solitude at Genthod,
Charles Bonnet, far from favorable generally to Voltaire, writes to
Haller, "Voltaire has done a work on tolerance which is said to be good;
he will not publish it until after the affair of the unfortunate Calas
has been decided by the king's council.  Voltaire's zeal for these
unfortunates might cover a multitude of sins; that zeal does not relax,
and, if they obtain satisfaction, it will be principally to his
championship that they will owe it.  He receives much commendation for
this business, and he deserves it fully."

The sentence of the council cleared the accused and the memory of John
Calas, ordering that their names should be erased and effaced from the
registers, and the judgment transcribed upon the margin of the
charge-sheet.  The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her
children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate
compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical
injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse.  Madame Calas asked no more.
"To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders," said a letter to Voltaire
from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, "requires the
permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these
petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission,
through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused."

Voltaire, however, was triumphant.  "You were at Paris," he writes to
M. de Cideville, "when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily.
The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest
fifth act there is on the stage."  Henceforth he finds himself
transformed into the defender of the oppressed.  The Protestant Chaumont,
at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank
Voltaire.  The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the
interview to Paul Rabaut: "I told him that I had brought him a little
fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having,
by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont
whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to
bring in.  At the name of Chaumont M. de Voltaire showed a transport of
joy, and rang at once to have him brought in.  Never did any scene appear
to me more amusing and refreshing.  'What,' said he, 'my poor, little,
good fellow, they sent you to the galleys!  What did they mean to do with
you?  What a conscience they must have to put in fetters and chain to the
oar a man who had committed no crime beyond praying to God in bad
French!'  He turned several times to me, denouncing persecution.  He
summoned into his room some persons who were staying with him, that they
might share the joy he felt at seeing poor little Chaumont, who, though
perfectly well attired for his condition, was quite astonished to find
himself so well received.  There was nobody, down to an ex-Jesuit, Father
Adam, who did not come forward to congratulate him."

Innate love of justice and horror of fanaticism had inspired Voltaire
with his zeal on behalf of persecuted Protestants; a more personal
feeling, a more profound sympathy, caused his grief and his dread when
Chevalier de la Barre, accused of having mutilated a crucifix, was
condemned, in 1766, to capital punishment; the scepticism of the
eighteenth century had sudden and terrible reactions towards fanatical
violence, as a protest and a pitiable struggle against the doubt which
was invading it on all sides; the chevalier was executed; he was not
twenty years old.  He was an infidel and a libertine, like the majority
of the young men of his day and of his age; the crime he expiated so
cruelly was attributed to reading bad books, which had corrupted him.
"I am told," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert, "that they said at their
examination that they had been led on to the act of madness they
committed by the works of the _Encyclopaedists_.  I can scarcely believe
it; these madmen don't read; and certainly no philosopher would have
counselled profanation.  The matter is important; try to get to the
bottom of so odious and dangerous a report."  And, at another time, to
Abbe Morellet, "You know that Councillor Pasquier said in full Parliament
that the young men of Abbeville who were put to death had imbibed their
impiety in the school and the works of the modern philosophers.  .  .  .
They were mentioned by name; it is a formal denunciation.  .  .  .  Wise
men, under such terrible circumstances, should keep quiet and wait."

Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself
arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge.  "My
heart is withered," he exclaims, "I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and
die in some land where men are less unjust."  He wrote to the Great
Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for
an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with
the persecuted philosophers.  His imagination was going wild.  "I went to
him," says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his;
"after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a
mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on
foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my
astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw
it was.  Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into
tears, 'Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!' was all he answered.  A few days
afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied
all the powers of malevolence."

Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and
disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from
the "home of society," as he had himself called Paris.  In vain he wrote
to Diderot, "A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country
in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away
into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express
what you pleased, but to preach openly against superstitions as
disgraceful as they are sanguinary.  You would not be solitary there; you
would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there,
the chair of truth.  Your library might go by water, and there would not
be four leagues' journey by land.  In fine, you would leave slavery for
freedom."

All these inducements having failed of effect, Voltaire gave up the
foundation of a colony at Cleves, to devote all his energy to that at
Ferney.  There he exercised signorial rights with an active and restless
guardianship which left him no illusions and but little sympathy in
respect of that people whose sacred rights he had so often proclaimed.
"The people will always be sottish and barbarous," he wrote to M. Bordes;
"they are oxen needing a yoke, a goad, and a bit of hay."  That was the
sum and substance of what he thought; he was a stern judge of the French
character, the genuine and deep-lying resources of which he sounded
imperfectly, but the infinite varieties of which he recognized.  "I
always find it difficult to conceive," he wrote to M. de Constant, "how
so agreeable a nation can at the same time be so ferocious, how it can so
easily pass from the opera to the St. Bartholomew, be at one time made up
of dancing apes and at another of howling bears, be so ingenious and so
idiotic both together, at one time so brave and at another so dastardly."
Voltaire fancied himself at a comedy still; the hour of tragedy was at
hand.  He and his friends were day by day weakening the foundations of
the edifice; for eighty years past the greatest minds and the noblest
souls have been toiling to restore it on new and strong bases; the work
is not finished, revolution is still agitating the depths of French
society, which has not yet recovered the only proper foundation-stones
for greatness and order amongst a free people.

Henceforth Voltaire reigned peacefully over his little empire at Ferney,
courted from afar by all the sovereigns of Europe who made any profession
of philosophy.  "I have a sequence of four kings" (_brelan de roi
quatrieme_), he would say with a laugh when he counted his letters from
royal personages.  The Empress of Russia, Catherine II., had dethroned,
in his mind, the Great Frederick.  Voltaire had not lived in her
dominions and at her court; he had no grievance against her; his vanity
was flattered by the eagerness and the magnificent attentions of the
Semiramis of the North, as he called her.  He even forgave her the most
odious features of resemblance to the Assyrian princess.  "I am her
knight in the sight and in the teeth of everybody," he wrote to Madame du
Deffand; "I am quite aware that people bring up against her a few trifles
on the score of her husband; but these are family matters with which I do
not meddle, and besides it is not a bad thing to have a fault to repair.
It is an inducement to make great efforts in order to force the public to
esteem and admiration, and certainly her knave of a husband would never
have done any one of the great things my Catherine does every day."  The
portrait of the empress, worked in embroidery by herself, hung in
Voltaire's bedroom.  In vain had he but lately said to Pastor Bertrand,
"My dear philosopher, I have, thank God, cut all connection with kings;"
instinct and natural inclination were constantly re-asserting themselves.
Banished from the court of Versailles by the disfavor of Louis XV., he
turned in despite towards the foreign sovereigns who courted him.
"Europe is enough for me," he writes; "I do not trouble myself much about
the Paris clique, seeing that that clique is frequently guided by envy,
cabal, bad taste, and a thousand petty interests which are always opposed
to the public interest."

Voltaire, however, returned to that Paris in which he was born, in which
he had lived but little since his early days, to which he belonged by the
merits as well as the defects of his mind, and in which he was destined
to die.  In spite of his protests about his being a rustic and a
republican, he had never allowed himself to slacken the ties which united
him to his Parisian friends; the letters of the patriarch of Ferney
circulated amongst the philosophical fraternity; they were repeated in
the correspondence of Grimm and Diderot with foreign princes; from his
splendid retreat at Ferney he cheered and excited the literary zeal and
often the anti-religious ardor of the _Encyclopaedists_.  He had,
however, ceased all working connection with that great work since it had
been suspended and afterwards resumed at the orders and with the
permission of government.  The more and more avowed materialistic
theories revolted his shrewd and sensible mind; without caring to go to
the bottom of his thought and contemplate its consequences, he clung to
the notion of Providence as to a waif in the great shipwreck of positive
creeds; he could not imagine

"This clock without a Maker could exist."

It is his common sense, and not the religious yearnings of his soul, that
makes him write in the poem of La Loi naturelle,--

O God, whom men ignore, whom everything reveals,
Hear Thou the latest words of him who now appeals;
'Tis searching out Thy law that hath bewildered me;
My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee.

When he was old and suffering, he said to Madame Necker, in one of those
fits of melancholy to which he was subject, "The thinking faculty is lost
just like the eating, drinking, and digesting faculties.  The marionettes
of Providence, in fact, are not made to last so long as It."  In his
dying hour Voltaire was seen showing more concern for terrestrial
scandals than for the terrors of conscience, crying aloud for a priest,
and, with his mouth full of the blood he spat, still repeating in a half
whisper, "I don't want to be thrown into the kennel."  A sad confession
of the insufficiency of his convictions and of the inveterate levity of
his thoughts; he was afraid of the judgment of man without dreading the
judgment of God.  Thus was revealed the real depth of an infidelity of
which Voltaire himself perhaps had not calculated the extent and the
fatal influences.

Voltaire was destined to die at Paris; there he found the last joys of
his life and there he shed the last rays of his glory.  For the twenty-
seven years during which he had been away from it he had worked much,
written much, done much.  Whilst almost invariably disavowing his works,
he had furnished philosophy with pointed and poisoned weapons against
religion; he had devoted to humanity much time and strength; one of the
last delights he had tasted was the news of the decree which cleared the
memory of M. de Lally; he had received into his house, educated and found
a husband for the grand-niece of the great Corneille; he had applied the
inexhaustible resources of his mind at one time to good and at another to
evil, with almost equal ardor; he was old, he was ill, yet this same
ardor still possessed him when he arrived at Paris on the 10th of
February, 1778.  The excitement caused by his return was extraordinary.
"This new prodigy has stopped all other interest for some time," writes
Grimm; it has put an end to rumors of war, intrigues in civil life,
squabbles at court.  Encyclopeadic pride appeared diminished by half, the
Sorbonne shook all over, the Parliament kept silence; all the literary
world is moved, all Paris is ready to fly to the idol's feet."  So much
attention and so much glory had been too much for the old man.  Voltaire
was dying; in his fright he had sent for a priest and had confessed; when
he rose from his bed by a last effort of the marvellous elasticity,
inherent in his body and his mind, he resumed for a while the course of
his triumphs.  "M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the
Academy and at the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches to
the Academy besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him,
pass and then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated
plaudits and acclamations.  The Academy came out into the first room to
meet him, an honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even
to the foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.
The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that
which awaited him at the National theatre.  As soon as his carriage
was seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of joy.  All the
curb-stones, all the barriers, all the windows were crammed with
spectators, and, scarcely was the carriage stopped, when people were
already on the imperial and even on the wheels to get a nearer view of
the divinity.  Scarcely had he entered the house when Sieur Brizard came
up with a crown of laurels, which Madame de Villette placed upon the
great man's head, but which he immediately took off, though the public
urged him to keep it on by clapping of hands and by cheers which
resounded from all corners of the house with such a din as never was
heard.

"All the women stood up.  I saw at one time that part of the pit which
was under the boxes going down on their knees, in despair of getting a
sight any other way.  The whole house was darkened with the dust raised
by the ebb and flow of the excited multitude.  It was not without
difficulty that the players managed at last to begin the piece.  It was
_Irene,_ which was given for the sixth time.  Never had this tragedy been
better played, never less listened to, never more applauded.  The
illustrious old man rose to thank the public, and, the moment afterwards,
there appeared on a pedestal in the middle of the stage a bust of this
great man, and the actresses, garlands and crowns in hand, covered it
with laurels; M. de Voltaire seemed to be sinking beneath the burden of
age and of the homage with which he had just been overwhelmed.  He
appeared deeply affected, his eyes still sparkled amidst the pallor of
his face, but it seemed as if he breathed no longer save with the
consciousness of his glory.  The people shouted, 'Lights! lights! that
everybody may see him!'  The coachman was entreated to go at a walk, and
thus he was accompanied by cheering and the crowd as far as Pont Royal."

Thus is described in the words of an eye-witness the last triumph of an
existence that had been one of ceaseless agitation, owing to Voltaire
himself far more than to the national circumstances and events of the
time at which he lived.  His anxious vanity and the inexhaustible
movement of his mind had kept him constantly fluctuating between
alternations of intoxication and despair; he had the good fortune to die
at the very pinnacle of success and renown, the only immortality he could
comprehend or desire, at the outset of a new and hopeful reign; he did
not see, he had never apprehended the terrible catastrophe to which he
had been thoughtlessly contributing for sixty years.  A rare piece of
good fortune and one which might be considered too great, if the limits
of eternal justice rested upon earth and were to be measured by our
compass.

Voltaire's incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he
contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity,
justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the
eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat,
brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as
yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of
common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his
friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes;
his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences
which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the
Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his
disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to
them.  Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and
stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep
yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul,
which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time.  At
the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the
chaos it caused in men's souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which
remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France
of our day.  The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian than
materialistic.

Other influences, more sincere and at the same time more dangerous, were
simultaneously undermining men's minds.  The group of Encyclopaedists,
less prudent and less temperate than Voltaire, flaunted openly the flag
of revolt.  At the head marched Diderot, the most daring of all, the most
genuinely affected by his own ardor, without perhaps being the most sure
of his ground in his negations.  His was an original and exuberant
nature, expansively open to all new impressions.  "In my country," he
says, "we pass within twenty-four hours from cold to hot, from calm to
storm, and this changeability of climate extends to the persons.  Thus,
from earliest infancy, they are wont to shift with every wind.  The head
of a Langrois stands on his shoulders like a weathercock on the top of a