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Voltaire issued yet another edition of Akakia, appended a somewhat unauthorised version of the President's letter, and added that if the dangerous and cruel man really persisted in his threat he would be received with a vigorous discharge from those instruments of intimate utility which figure so freely in the comedies of Molière. This stroke was the coup de grâce of Maupertuis.
This of the Two Capuchins, the last consummation of collapse in man, is what Voltaire cannot forget, but crows over with his shrillest mockery; and seldom mentions Maupertuis without that last touch to his life-drama. On the very day of Maxen, Tuesday, November 20th, the grand French Invasion found its terminus, not on the shores of Britain, but of Brittany, to its surprise.
What of all the theories, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Copernicus to Galileo, Descartes and his zones, Leibnitz and his monads, Wolf and his fire forces, Maupertuis and his intelligent elements, Broussais, who, in his anatomical lectures, has oftener than once shown to his pupils, on the point of his scalpel, the source of thought; what, I say, becomes of all these?"
In certain or uncertain physical conditions, the mind can project and objectify, its own creations. Thus Gleditch saw the dead Maupertuis, with perfect distinctness, in the salle of the Academy at Berlin. Yes: but how does that explain volatile pots and pans? Well, there are collective hallucinations, as when the persecuted in the Cevennes, like the Covenanters, heard non-existent psalmody.
They are not out in any part of polite conversation; they are acquainted with all the places, customs, courts, and families that are likely to be mentioned; they are, as Monsieur de Maupertuis justly observes, 'de tous les pays, comme les savans, sont de tous les tems'. You have, fortunately, both those advantages: the only remaining point is 'de savoir les faire valoir', for without that one may as well not have them.
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.
Maupertuis, referee in that quarrel, had, with a bluntness offensive to the female mind, declared Konig indisputably in the right; and there had followed a dryness between the divine Emilie and the Flattener of the Earth, scarcely to be healed by Voltaire's best efforts.
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.
During this time also, in direct disregard of a promise he had made Frederick, there appeared a supplement to "Doctor Akakia," more offensive than the main text. It was followed by a virulent correspondence with Maupertuis. Voltaire was filling up the vials of wrath of the king. On May 31 he reached Frankfort. Here the blow fell.
"And the sum of the specific gravities of these two substances is 10, precisely the number that represents Gallia's density." "A comet of gold!" ejaculated the captain. "Yes; a realization of what the illustrious Maupertuis has already deemed probable," replied the astronomer.
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