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The King was accustomed to Voltaire's impertinences, and he pardoned them for the moment, but stored them in his memory. "But now, don't stick poking about in your room, Monsieur. Come out for a walk with me. We will philosophise in the cool of the evening. I have so much to say, and must put my thoughts in order for the great work." "Sire, I will come immediately." "No, now; I am waiting."
There was vengeance in his very accent, but there was piety also. Voltaire's followers would have overturned altars, those of Rousseau would have raised them. The one could have done without virtues, and made arrangements with thrones; the other had absolute need of a God, and could only have founded republics.
Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.
There is a great gulf between the signs perceived by Aristippus signs of the mental activity which engages in geometrical demonstrations and Voltaire's sign of civilization the brutal execution of a brutal criminal.
I was roused from my anxious reverie by the sound of locking the great iron gates, the bolts and bars making a huge noise in the stillness of the night. This grating sound, however, did not drown those words of Francezka's. Something led my footsteps again to the street, where I could get from the back a clear view of Monsieur Voltaire's room.
Gibbon seldom failed to procure a ticket to these representations. Voltaire played the parts suited to his years; his declamation, Gibbon thought, was old-fashioned, and "he expressed the enthusiasm of poetry rather than the feelings of nature." "The parts of the young and fair," he said, "were distorted by Voltaire's fat and ugly niece."
Voltaire would be saying his Adieus, in state, among the others, to that high Being, just in the hours while such a scandalous Hirsch-Concoction went, on underground! "As to the Two Bills and Voltaire's security for them, readers are to note as follows. Alas, the shot will not even go off, for some time: an ill omen! "SUNDAY, 29th NOVEMBER, Hirsch, we hear, is still in Berlin.
Voltaire from of old had faithfully done his kowtows to this King of the Sciences; and, with a sort of terror, had suffered with incredible patience a great deal from him. But there comes an end to all things; Voltaire's patience not excepted. It lay in the fates that Maupertuis should steadily accumulate, day after day, and now more than ever heretofore, upon the sensitive Voltaire.
Oddly enough Churton Collins apparently believed it, partly from the evidence afforded by the 'fulsome flattery' and 'exaggerated compliments' to be found in Voltaire's correspondence, which, he says, reveal a man in whom 'falsehood and hypocrisy are of the very essence of his composition.
And here, finally, with date happily appended, is a poetic snatch, in Voltaire's exquisite style, which with the response gives us the medium view: "Non, malgre vos vertus, non, malgre vos appas, Mon ame n'est point satisfaite; Non, vous n'etes qu'une coquette, Qui subjuguez les coeurs, et ne rous donnez pas."
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