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In place of the movement which thinned the ranks of the unbelievers to the advantage of the faithful, we saw the two parties unite together; the eighteenth century appeared once more in arms; Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and their worst disciples once more spread themselves abroad and recruited innumerable battalions.
It contained a burlesque and licentious poem, called the "Palladium," in which the king scoffed at everybody and everything in a manner he preferred not to make public. Voltaire in Berlin might be trusted to remain discreet. In Paris his discretion could not be counted on. Frederick wanted the poem in his own hands.
In 1851 the books numbered 1,800; now they may be 2,000; kept neat and clean in two rooms of the fine solid old building. Of course the collection is somewhat mixed, Fox's 'Martyrs' and the 'Lives of the Saints' standing peacefully near the 'Encyclopedie' and Voltaire. A catalogue can hardly be expected.
Rest, he said, made a man rusty, and attendance upon the worship of God he denounced as worse than folly. His favorite books were the works of Voltaire, and he named his best ships after the most celebrated French infidels. Yet this man, so unloved, so undeserving of love, is said to have once had a warm heart.
Frederic had, by playing for his own amusement on the feelings of the two jealous and vainglorious Frenchmen, succeeded in producing a bitter enmity between them. Voltaire resolved to set his mark, a mark never to be effaced, on the forehead of Maupertuis, and wrote the exquisitely ludicrous Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.
The philosophers, ranged under the banner of Voltaire, who was their god, and of d'Alembert, their patriarch, knew all his inclinations for them, and knew how far they might rely on his support in all attempts which they made to weaken the power of the clergy, and to diminish the gigantic riches which had been amassed by prelates and monasteries.
He took a step nearer her, and asked, eagerly: "Who told you that?" "My father himself. He spoke of a Mr. Vanrevel whom he disliked, and whom I must not meet; and, remembering what you had said, of course I knew that you were he." "Oh!" Crailey's lips began to form a smile of such appealing and inimitable sweetness that Voltaire would have trusted him; a smile alto-gether rose-leaves.
My father, my two aunts, still holding in their hands, one her rosary and the other her Voltaire, my own nurse, poor old woman, who had come in a cab. "Well," they exclaimed anxiously, "well?" "It is all over, it is a boy; go in, he is there." You can not imagine how happy I was to see on all their faces the reflection of my own emotion.
You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?"
To all these details, which the marshal acknowledges to be correct, Voltaire adds a remarkable note: "What increases our wonder is, that when the unknown captive was sent to the Iles Sainte-Marguerite no personage of note disappeared from the European stage."
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