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Before the play was allowed to begin, his majesty the king of the coal-heavers read the bulletin of the day announcing the rapid progress of the queen toward recovery; and then, giving his hand to the queen of the fish-wives, the august pair, followed by their respective suites, executed a dance expressive of their delight at the good news, and then resumed their seats, and listened to Voltaire's "Zaire" with the most edifying gravity.
"Yes, you will remember it is the anniversary of Voltaire's death, and after I have quarrelled for two years with the priests and so-called holy fathers at Rome, I have gained my point, and the honor shall be shown him here in Berlin which the priests and friars have refused to the immortal poet in his own country.
He composed the musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to music that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïre owed his seat in the Academy.
But the urgent demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance.
We heard of them, favorably, in Voltaire's time; and may again, at least of the Lady, who is henceforth a Correspondent of Friedrich's. The above is a dim direct view of them, probably our last as well as first.
It was that very autumn that Madame Villars had kissed Voltaire publicly, in her box at the theater, at the first performance of Mérope, and to the delight of the audience. Perhaps Monsieur Voltaire's head was not a little turned by this; perhaps Madame du Châtelet could have told a tale of the airs he gave himself with all the women after that, but no matter.
The optimism of so many of his contemporaries appeared to him a shallow crude doctrine unrelated to the facts of existence, and it was to give expression to this view that he composed the most famous of all his works Candide. This book, outwardly a romance of the most flippant kind, contains in reality the essence of Voltaire's maturest reflections upon human life.
Well, what does Prince Henry wish?" "A small favor, your royal highness; he wishes, on the birthday of his wife, to have Voltaire's 'Rome Sauvee' given by the French tragedians. Some years since your highness had a great triumph in this piece.
As the years advanced, Voltaire's industry, which had always been astonishing, continually increased. As if his intellectual interests were not enough to occupy him, he took to commercial enterprise, developed the resources of his estates, and started a successful colony of watchmakers at Ferney.
Voltaire he interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to please the great man by repeating a characteristic trait of Bozzy, who believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive to the practice of benevolence Johnson's criticism upon Frederick the Great's writings, 'such as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy to do, who has been his amanuensis. He broached the subject of the philosophy of the unconscious, and was eager to know how ideas forgotten at the time were yet later on recollected.
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