Desnoiresterres has well observed that this mad eighteenth century produced the extraordinary anomaly of being at once that of scepticism and intolerance, of the most degraded superstition and the most barefaced irreligion. It might be thought—it is generally thought—that persecution would certainly not proceed from persons who were too indifferent to their faith to make the slightest attempt to live up to it. But if the history of religious hatred be closely followed, it will be seen that it is precisely these persons who are the cruellest persecutors. Perhaps they act on that old principle of compensation—“Give me the desire of my soul, and the gratification of my flesh, and by the scaffold, the torture, and the wheel, I will bring souls to the faith I only profess.” There seems no other explanation of the fact that this “rotten age whose armies fled without a fight before a handful of men; this age which laughed at everything and cared for nothing but wit,” was as fiercely intolerant and besottedly bigot as the age of Ignatius Loyola and Catherine de’ Medici.

The case of Calas was but one of many. It was not finished when another, scarcely less sombre and terrible, was brought under Voltaire’s notice.

In 1760 there lived near fanatic Toulouse, at a place called Castres, a Protestant family of the name of Sirven. Sirven pÈre, aged about fifty-one, was a professional feudiste; that is to say, he was a person learned in feudal tenures, who kept registers and explained the obsolete terms of ancient leases, and thus was brought much in contact with the great families of the province. Thoroughly honest, honourable, and respectable, his wife shared these qualities with him. They had three daughters—Marie Anne, who was now married, Jeanne and Elizabeth, who both lived at home.

Elizabeth, the youngest, was feeble-minded: but on that very account—on that old, tender parental principle of making up by love for the cruelty of fortune—she was the dearest to her parents. On March 6, 1760, the poor girl suddenly disappeared. After vainly hunting for her all day, when Sirven reached his home at night he was told that the Bishop of Castres desired to see him. He went. The Bishop informed him that Elizabeth, whose deficient brain was certainly not equal to weighing the pros and cons of different religions, had ardently desired to become a Roman Catholic, and that to receive instruction in that faith she had been placed in the Convent of the Black Ladies. The poor father received the news more calmly than might have been expected. He said that he had no idea his daughter wished to change her religion; but that if the change was to be for her good and happiness, he would not oppose it.

The situation was a strange one. But it had a very common solution. The Bishop had a strong-minded sister who had caught that “epidemic of the time,” which the infected called religious zeal.

Meanwhile poor Elizabeth in her convent, having been first “taught her catechism by blows,” as Voltaire said, began, like many another weak intellect under strong suggestion, to see visions and to dream dreams. She became, in short, what a nun might call a saint, but what a doctor would call a lunatic. The Black Ladies declared that she implored them to corporally chastise her for the good of her soul; and it was certainly a fact that when she was returned to her parents in the October of 1760, quite insane, her body was “covered with the marks of the convent whip.” If her father complained loudly of her treatment, such complaints, though natural, were infinitely imprudent. My Lord Bishop and the authorities kept a very keen official eye on M. Sirven, and harried him on the subject of his daughter whenever a chance offered. The sheep had gone back to the wolves, the brand to the burning. Rome never yet sat down with folded hands, as other Churches have done, and calmly watched her children desert her.

In the July of 1761 the Sirvens moved to a village called St. Alby, that Sirven might be near some business on which he was engaged.

On December 17, 1761, when he was staying at the chÂteau of a M. d’Esperandieu, for whom he was working, Elizabeth slipped out of her home at night, and never returned. Her mother and sister had at once given notice of her disappearance, and prayed that a search might be made. Sirven, called home, arrived on the morning of the 18th, and caused a still further search to be prosecuted. But in vain. A fortnight passed. On January 3, 1762, the unhappy father, who fancied, not unnaturally, that Elizabeth might have been decoyed away by her Roman friends, had to go in pursuit of his trade to a place called Burlats.

That same night the body of Elizabeth was discovered in a well at St. Alby.

The authorities were at once communicated with, and the judge of Mazamet, the David de Beaudrigue of the case. The body was taken to the HÔtel de Ville. There was abundant local testimony to the effect that the poor girl, had often been seen looking into the well, muttering to herself. The case was clearly one of suicide or misadventure. Either was possible. But that it was one of the two was morally certain.

A lodger in the Sirvens’ house at St. Alby could swear that only the footsteps of one person had been heard descending the stairs of the house on the night of December 17th, before Jeanne had hastened to those lodgers and told them of Elizabeth’s flight. In addition to this, while the poor girl herself had been tall and strong, her mother was feeble and old; her married sister, who was staying with her parents, was also feeble and in ill-health; and Elizabeth could easily have resisted Jeanne, had she attempted, unaided, to be her murderess.

Singly, then, none of the three could have killed Elizabeth; and that they had done it together, apart from the inherent improbability and the inhuman nature of such a crime, there was not an iota of evidence to prove. As in the case of Calas, no cries had been heard, and there were no signs of a struggle.

As for Sirven himself, he could declare an alibi. On the night in question he had supped and slept at the chÂteau of M. d’Esperandieu.

But such evidence, or any evidence, weighed nothing with a people who had at the moment innocent Calas in irons in the dungeon of Toulouse. “It passes for fact among the Catholics of the province,” wrote Voltaire in irony that came very near to being the literal truth, “that it is one of the chief points of the Protestant religion that fathers and mothers should hang, strangle, or drown all their children whom they suspect of having any penchant for the Roman faith.” Sirven’s public, like Calas’s, had “a need of dramatic emotion enough to change truth into a legend.”

What use to examine the body? No facts will alter our conviction. Beaudrigue, savage bigot though he was, had known his profession; the Beaudrigue of this case, Trinquier, the judge of Mazamet, was a little ignorant tradesman, who through the whole affair showed himself to be a tool in clever hands, a wire pulled—at Rome.

At first, Sirven was mad enough to rely on his own innocence, and the innocence of his family, to save them all. January 6 to 10, 1762, was spent in examining the witnesses. The honest Catholic villagers of St. Alby bore testimony to a man in favour of Sirven. But the attitude of the doctors who examined the body might well have alarmed him. It alarmed his friends; on their advice he employed an avocat, Jalabert.

Jalabert was devoted and expert. But the devotion of a saint and the brilliancy of a genius would not have helped the Sirvens.

They were charged with the murder of Elizabeth, and instantly took their decision. Proofs had not freed Calas—why should they save them? Remembering the fury of the people of Toulouse, “they fled while there was yet time.”

They stayed at their old home, Castres, at the house of a friend, for one night. Under the cover of the next they walked through rain, mire, and darkness to five-miles distant Roquecombe. So far, they had at least been together.

But they saw very clearly now that they could not hope to escape notice if they travelled en famille.

On January 21st or 22d, the unhappy father tore himself from them, and for a month remained hidden among the mountains, only ten miles from Castres. Then he moved on. Through the snows of an icy winter he crossed the frontier, arrived at Geneva, and early in the April of 1762, at Lausanne.

His family, after having endured infinite perils and hardships, arrived there in June. On the way, among the glaciers and in the bitter cold of a mountain winter, Marie Anne had borne a dead child.

They had one consolation. Their flight was not unnecessary. Three Declarations had been published against them; though it was not until March 29, 1764, that the court formally sentenced the parents to be hanged, and the daughters to witness that execution, and then to perpetual banishment under pain of death.

On September 11th this sentence was carried out in effigy.

By that time the generous republicans of Berne had given Madame and her daughters, who were living at Lausanne, a little pension; their property having, of course, been confiscated to the King. PÈre Sirven was working at his trade at Geneva, and so was a near neighbour of Voltaire’s.

Moultou, the friend and correspondent of Rousseau, brought the Sirvens one day to Ferney. Voltaire already knew their history. But the time was not ripe for another Quixotic knight-errantry. Calas was not yet vindicated. Apart from the inordinate amount of work it would entail, to take a second case in hand might militate against the interests of the first. Then the affair of the Sirvens would present far greater legal difficulties. They had fled the kingdom. They would have to be acquitted, if they were to be acquitted, not by the Parliament of Paris, but by the Parliament of Toulouse. And Voltaire was too much of an artist not to be perfectly aware that this cause would not have the Éclat and the dramatic effects of the Calas’. “It lacked a scaffold.”

But when the Sirvens clung with tears about his feet and implored him, as the saviour of Calas, to save them also—“What was I to do? What would you have done in my place?” “It is impossible to picture so much innocence and so much wretchedness.” When the d’Argentals reproached him as unwise, “Here are too many parricide lawsuits indeed,” he wrote. “But, my dear angels, whose fault is that?” And, again, as his excuse, “I have only done in the horrible disasters of Calas and the Sirvens what all men do: I have followed my bent. That of a philosopher is not to pity the unfortunate, but to serve them.” He records himself how a priest said to him, “Why interfere? Let the dead bury their dead”; and how he replied, “I have found an Israelite by the roadside: let me give him a little oil and wine for his wounds. You are the Levite: let me be the Samaritan.”

That priest’s answer, if any, is not recorded.

In short the thing was done.

On March 8, 1765, the day before the Calas suit was triumphantly concluded, Voltaire wrote joyfully that the generous Élie de Beaumont would also defend the Sirvens. After that March 9th Voltaire could throw himself yet more thoroughly into the case. Calas is vindicated! So shall the Sirvens be!

But if there had been need for patience in the first affair, there was a hundred times greater need in the second.

The Parliament of Toulouse declined to give up its papers, as it had declined before. And then that flight—“the reason of their condemnation is in their flight. They are judged by contumacy.”

In June, too, the death of Madame Sirven—“of her sorrows”—removed a most important and most valuable witness for the defence. Then the Sirvens had no money. Voltaire had to supply all—brains, wealth, influence, labour, literary talent. For seven years he worked the case with an energy that never tired, an enthusiasm that never cooled. When it had been going on for four years, he wrote that it “agitated all his soul.” “This ardour, this fever, this perpetual exaltation”—what worker, however hot and persevering he fancy himself, is not ashamed by it, and astounded?

Voltaire wrote Memoirs for the Sirvens. He won over the disapproving d’Argentals to be as “obstinate” about it (the phrase is his own) as he was himself. He got up a subscription to which the great Frederick and the great Catherine of Russia gave generously; and Madame Geoffrin made her protÉgÉ, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski—now King of Poland—contribute too.

Finally, Voltaire succeeded in persuading Sirven to return to Mazamet, where the case was re-tried; and on December 25, 1771, when Voltaire was seventy-seven years old, the Parliament of Toulouse met and completely exculpated the accused. As Voltaire said, it had taken them two hours to condemn innocence, and nine years to give it justice. Still, the thing was done.

In 1772, the Sirvens came to Ferney to thank their benefactor, and afforded him one of the highest of human pleasures: “the sight of a happiness which was his own work.”

The year 1765, in which Voltaire showed so much public spirit, was not privately uneventful. In it he gave up DÉlices, which he had bought in 1755, and whose place Ferney had altogether usurped in his heart. In 1829, DÉlices was still in possession of the Tronchin family, from whom Voltaire had rented it. In 1881, it was a girls’ school.

In 1766, he also gave up the lease of ChÊne, his house in Lausanne.

In the January of 1765, Voltaire and Frederick the Great were again reconciled after a quarrel and a break in their correspondence which had lasted four years. Frederick, forsooth, had chosen to take as a personal insult the fact that Voltaire should waste his talents writing that stupid history about “the wolves and bears of Siberia”! And why in the world should he want to dedicate his “Tancred” to that old enemy of the Prussian monarch’s, Madame de Pompadour? Voltaire, on his side, was minded to write any history he chose, and dedicate his plays to anybody he liked, and would thank Frederick not to interfere.

Then, at the end of 1764 he hears that Frederick is ill—and to the wind with both his heat and his coldness at once.

Frederick replied rather witheringly to the peace overtures on January 1, 1765: “I supposed you to be so busy crushing l’infÂme ... that I did not dare to presume you would think of anything else.”

But the ice was broken. Both succumbed to the old, old, fatal, potent charm. They wrote to each other about “once a fortnight”; discussed everything in heaven and earth; and until they should be mortal enemies again, were, once more, more than friends.

Frederick was once again, too, the friend not only of Voltaire, but of Voltaire’s country. The Seven Years’ War had been concluded in 1763 by the peace of Hubertsburg. Frederick kept Silesia; and France, with her feeble ministry and her doddering King, lost, to England, Canada, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Minorca.

Changes were rife elsewhere too. Voltaire’s friend Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, had died in 1762, and was succeeded nominally by the miserable Peter, but really by his wife, Catherine the Great. In 1763, Peter disappeared under strong suspicions of poison, and Catherine reigned in his stead.

Many kings and potentates have been named the Great, but few so justly as Catherine.

If she was the perpetrator of great crimes, this woman of three-and-thirty was, even at her accession, of vast genius, of extraordinary capacity as a ruler, broad and liberal in her aims, and an enlightened lover of the arts. She declared that since 1746 she had been under the greatest obligations to Voltaire; that his letters had formed her mind. With the telepathy of intellect, these two master-minds had from their different corners of the world detected each other’s greatness. They never met in the flesh. But from their correspondence it is easy to see their close spiritual affinity. Their earliest letters, which are preserved, date from the July of this 1765.

Voltaire shocked even Paris and Madame du Deffand by the airy way in which he took that little peccadillo of the Empress’s, “that bagatelle about a husband.” “Those are family affairs,” he said, not without a wicked twinkle in his eyes, “with which I do not mix myself.” It is certain that, whether or no he believed Catherine a murderess, he regarded her as a great woman and served her when he could.

There came an opportunity in August. Her Majesty is pleased to admire girls’ education as conducted in Switzerland, and sends Count BÜlow to arrange for a certain number of Swiss governesses to be brought to Moscow and Petersburg to instruct the noble jeunes filles of those cities.

Splendid idea! says Voltaire. But that “bagatelle about a husband” weighs on the Puritan conscience of Geneva. It is extraordinary now to think that any civilised Government could have dared so to interfere with personal liberty as to prevent women over age going to teach anyone they chose, anywhere they liked. But this is precisely what Geneva did. Voltaire was exceedingly angry. The refusal reflected on him. But he had done his best for Catherine, though in vain.

While this little affair was going on, a new friend, the young playwright La Harpe, of whom Voltaire was to see more hereafter, and an old friend, whom he had not seen for seventeen years, were both staying with him at Ferney.

On July 30th had arrived there “the sublime Clairon.” She had been the first actress of her day when Voltaire had known her in Paris. Now she was the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century, and in the rich maturity of her two-and-forty years a most clever and cultivated woman. She had helped Voltaire’s plays enormously; some she had made for him. He said so, at least. Further, she was one of the philosophers. In 1761 she had protested against the excommunication of actors as a class; and Voltaire, remembering Adrienne Lecouvreur, had seconded her with all the force and irony of his style.

When she reached Ferney her host was so ill that she had to declaim her rÔle in his “Orphan of China,” which cured him on the spot. Part of her visit he hobbled about on crutches, crippled by an attack of sciatica and half blind from an affection of the eyes, but as mentally lively and alert as if he had had both of those requisites for happiness, “the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage.”

Mademoiselle was not well herself, and under Tronchin. But she went on acting against the express orders of that good physician. It was in her blood, as it was in Voltaire’s. He had entirely rebuilt his theatre for her. He went quite mad over her superb talent; and declared that for the first time in his life he had seen perfection in any kind. Blind though his avuncular affection might be, when he beheld Clairon in the flesh he did not suggest that Madame Denis (who, with her sister, was acting too) could in any way be her rival.

Clairon was still at Ferney in August. Soon after she left, that faithful Damilaville paid a visit there; and during the summer had come, under the chaperonage of Lord Abingdon, the famous John Wilkes. “Voltaire is obliging to me beyond all description” was Wilkes’s record of his reception; while Voltaire, on his part, bore enthusiastic testimony to the great demagogue’s inexhaustible life and wit.

On the 8th or 9th of that August, when Voltaire was acting or telling stories, nimbly gesticulating with those crutches, events of sinister importance to him, and of importance to all men who hated l’infÂme, were taking place in Abbeville.

On one of those days, two large crucifixes in the town, one on a bridge, the other in a cemetery, were shamefully and blasphemously mutilated. The town was naturally very angry. It set itself busily to work to find the culprits. A few days later three suspected persons, all boys under one-and-twenty, were brought up before the authorities and questioned.

While their examination was proceeding, the Bishop of the diocese organised a solemn procession through the streets to the places where the sacrilege had been committed, and, kneeling there, invoked pardon for the blasphemers in ominous words, as “men who, though not beyond the reach of God’s mercy, had rendered themselves worthy of the severest penalty of this world’s law.”

The mutilated crucifixes were placed in a church, to which the people flocked in crowds, and in a temper of mind very different from that of Him who hung there in effigy and in the supreme agony had prayed for His murderers.

On September 26th, a formal decree of arrest was issued against the three young men, d’Étallonde de Morival, Moisnel, and the Chevalier de la Barre.

D’Étallonde had already fled to Prussia; partly, no doubt, because his conscience was ill at ease, but partly, too, because he, or his friends, knew the times and the people. In Prussia he was afterwards made, through Voltaire’s influence, an officer in Frederick’s army.

Moisnel was a timid and foolish boy of eighteen.

Jean FranÇois Lefebre, Chevalier de la Barre, was a young Norman, not yet twenty years old. He had been educated by a country curÉ. His aunt, the Abbess of Willancourt, had given him masters, and he had rooms assigned to him in her convent. It is thought, but is not certain, that La Barre was in the army. What is certain is that this clerical education had been a very bad one. The Abbess, if not a wicked woman, was certainly one who loved pleasure; who enjoyed a joke, even if it were against the religion she professed; who gave rollicking little supper-parties; adored her good-looking lively young scapegrace of a nephew, and permitted him not only to sing roystering and indecent drinking songs with foolish companions within her sacred walls, but to keep there a library which included not only some very indecorous books—but that little volume which “smelt of the fagot,” “The Philosophical Dictionary.”

At her supper-parties young La Barre had often met one Duval, or Belleval, who, it is said, had been in love with the Abbess, and was not a little jealous of her handsome nephew. It was Duval who had heard young La Barre chant Rabelaisian ditties, and quote “what he could recollect” from the “Pucelle” and the “Epistle to Uranie.” It was Duval who hated him, and Duval who denounced him.

On October 1, 1765, La Barre was arrested in the Abbey of Longvilliers, near Montreuil. Moisnel was also arrested.

On October 4th, the Abbess burnt her nephew’s library, which would have been a prudent act if she had done it thoroughly, but she did not. On October 10th, the authorities searched the boy’s rooms, and found in a press some indecent literature—and that “Philosophical Dictionary.”

After five cross-examinations, unhappy young Moisnel said practically what his judges told him to say, not only respecting himself, but respecting La Barre. He swore that d’Étallonde had mutilated the crucifixes, an assertion to which La Barre also swore. D’Étallonde was safe in Prussia. Moisnel, who was delicate in health and in horrible fear of death, lost in the trial the very little sense he had ever had. Young La Barre, on the other hand, kept all his pluck, wit, and coolness.

To a charge that, on the Feast of the Holy Sacrament, he and his two companions had lingered near a religious procession in the street, and neither knelt nor uncovered as reverence and custom demanded, he pleaded “Guilty.” He was in a hurry, he said, and had no evil intentions.

To the charge that to a person who bade him take another route if he could not behave himself, he had replied that he looked upon the Host as nothing but a piece of pastry and for his part could not swallow all the apostolic assertions, he answered that he might have used some such words.

It is not unworthy of remark that, though under torture he confessed to having mutilated the crucifix in the cemetery, the judges discovered no proof, and no proof ever was discovered, that he had mutilated the crucifix on the bridge. It is very much more remarkable that in his sentence the affair of the crucifixes was not even mentioned, and that he and absent d’Étallonde were condemned for “impiously and deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering; uttering blasphemies against God, the Saints, and the Church; singing blasphemous songs, and rendering marks of adoration to profane books.”

Now it will be allowed by any fair-minded person—whatever be his religion or irreligion—that to thus insult a faith, dear to millions of people for hundreds of generations, merited a sharp punishment.

As Voltaire said, “it deserved Saint Lazare.”

On February 28, 1766, d’Étallonde and La Barre were condemned to have their tongues torn out with hot irons, their right hands to be cut off, and to be burnt to death by a slow fire. In the case of La Barre this sentence was so far graciously remitted that he was to be beheaded before he was burnt; but, on the other hand, he was further condemned to the torture Ordinary and Extraordinary, to extract from him the names of his accomplices. Even for that time the sentence was so brutal—“could they have done more if he had killed his father?”—that no one believed it would be carried out. Against absent d’Étallonde, of course, it could not be. A public appeal was made to the King. Ten of the best avocats of Paris declared the sentence illegal. La Barre was taken to the capital, and his case retried there, where “a majority of five voices condemned to the most horrible torments a young man only guilty of folly.” He was taken back to Abbeville. All through the trial he had borne himself with a high courage. It did not leave him now. He recognised many old acquaintances on the way, and saluted them gaily. On the last evening of his life he supped with his confessor—a priest whom he had often met at his aunt’s gay table. “Let us have some coffee,” he is reported to have said; “it will not prevent my sleeping.” Bravado, perhaps. But bravado and brave are of the same origin. The next day, July 1, 1766, began with the torture. On his way to the scaffold the poor boy recognised among the cruel crowd of spectators not only many men whom he had called friend, but, to their everlasting shame, women too. That “barbarism which would have made even drunken savages shudder,” the pulling out of the tongue, was so barbarous that the five executioners only pretended to do it. On his way up to the scaffold La Barre’s shoe dropped off. He turned and put it on again. He bound his own eyes, and talked calmly to the executioners, and then died with “the firmness of Socrates”—a harder death.

It is said that the executioner who cut off the head did it so cleverly that the spectators applauded. The body was thrown to the flames—with “The Philosophical Thoughts” of Diderot; the “Sopha” of the younger CrÉbillon; two little volumes of Bayle; and “The Philosophical Dictionary,” which was supposed to have inspired the indecent impiety of which the unhappy boy had been guilty, but which certainly does inspire a religion not so unlike the religion of Christ as the savage hatred which killed La Barre.

The event caused a fearful sensation, even in the eighteenth century. The victim was so young, and had so nobly played the man. To the last moment, popular opinion had believed in a reprieve. One of the people who so believed was Voltaire. Vague reports of the case had reached him at first. Some young fools had been profaning a church, and then declaring in cross-examination that they had been led to do so by the books of the “EncyclopÆdia”! But then wild boys who commit drunken frolics do not read books of philosophy!

And when the tidings of that 1st of July had come—“My dear brother, my heart is withered.” Grimm wrote boldly and significantly of the event that “humanity awaited an avenger.” But this time how could the avenger be Voltaire? On the lips of all the churchmen were the words—Philosophy hath done this thing. This is where your fine freethinking, your mental emancipation, lead men! Certainly, it might have been answered that La Barre was not the product of philosophy, but of the Church; educated by a curÉ, finished by my Lady Abbess; sheltered, after his sin, in the Abbey of Longvilliers; given for his last confessor a priestly boon companion of those wild suppers at the convent. If the philosophers mocked at religion, what of the licentious priests of that wicked day? ChÂteauneuf, Chaulieu, Desfontaines—the names of a score of others must have come to Voltaire’s lips. This boy had put the teaching of such men into action. The more fool he; but not the greater criminal. There were a thousand excuses for him; and “tears come easily for the youth which has committed sins which in ripe age it would have redeemed.”

But Voltaire, with a guilty conscience one may hope, seems to have remembered that he had written not only “The Philosophical Dictionary,” but the ribald “Pucelle.” He might thereby have had some hand in La Barre’s undoing; and when he saw that men flung the whole responsibility for that sin on him and his brothers, the EncyclopÆdists, he feared.

By July 14th he had gone to Rolle in Vaud. He had been there in the spring for his health; now he went for his safety.

But, safe or dangerous, he must write his view of the case. By the 22d of the same month his account of “The Death of the Chevalier de la Barre” was complete. Clear, masterly, succinct, it is perhaps one of the finest tracts in the cause of humanity ever written, even by Voltaire himself. On July 25th, he was asking clever young Élie de Beaumont if there was any law, date 1681, by which those guilty of indecent impieties could be sentenced to death. He had himself looked everywhere in vain; which was not wonderful. There was no such law. The ignorance and fanaticism of the judges had “supposed its existence.” “This barbarity occupies me day and night.” True, La Barre was past the reach of human help. But Voltaire could hope that his cries “might frighten the carnivorous beasts from others.” They did that. The popular fury to which he gave mighty voice saved feeble Moisnel. After La Barre’s death the judges did not dare to proceed with the suit.

In 1775, when d’Étallonde was staying with him at Ferney, Voltaire wrote a pamphlet called “The Cry of Innocent Blood,” which had as its object the restitution of his civil rights to that young officer, to whom Frederick had accorded a long leave of absence. If he never obtained that restitution or full justification for the memory of La Barre, at least he never ceased to try. He worked the case for twelve years, and his labours were only stopped by death.

Partly for his own safety; partly in horror of a country which could sanction a vengeance so awful; partly in longing for an Elysium where he and his brothers might live and speak as free men, in this July of 1766, at Rolle, this boy Voltaire conceived the mad and hot-headed scheme of retiring, with all the enlightened, to Cleves, and forming there a literary society, with a printing press.

A dream! A dream! The other philosophers would not entertain the idea for a moment. Some of them, at least, felt “little suppers and the opÉra-comique” to be among the necessities of existence. D’Alembert, chief of them all, who had refused the Presidency of the Berlin Academy and to be tutor to Catherine the Great’s son for a quiet life, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was not going to be tempted from either—for Cleves!

“I see,” wrote Voltaire, “that M. Boursier” (which was one of his innumerable noms de guerre) “will have no workmen.” So he went back to Ferney.

“The suit and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre remain one of the indelible stains with which the magistracy of the eighteenth century tarnished and defiled its robes.”

That “Philosophical Dictionary”—of which the thin first volume had been burnt with La Barre; which in March, 1765, had been publicly destroyed in Paris by the hangman; which Rome anathematised, and of which liberal London had already demanded a fifth edition—is one of the greatest of Voltaire’s works, and one which should still be popular. It stands alone, without rival or counterpart. Brief articles on an enormous variety of subjects gave infinite scope for Voltaire’s versatility. Since he had written that first article, “Abraham,” which had made even sullen Frederick laugh, the thing had been its author’s commonplace book. If an article is too daring even for the “EncyclopÆdia”—put it in the “Dictionary.” If one feels gay, write buffoonery; or seriously, write with passion. The “Dictionary” had room for everything. Mockery, sarcasm, lightness, wit, gaiety, profundity, the most earnest thought, the most burning zeal, banter, irony, audacity—they are all here. “The Philosophical Dictionary” has well been said to be “the whole of citizen Voltaire.”

He had smuggled it into Geneva, and then gaily and without a pang of conscience denied that he had anything to do with its authorship. “If there is the least danger about it, please warn me, and then I can disown it in all the public papers with my usual candour and innocence.”

He kept it by his side, and wrote, now in this mood, now in that, first one article and then another, until it numbered eight volumes.

Even in this age of many books there is always room for another, if it be sufficiently piquant and out of the common. The astonishing variety of the subjects, and the not less marvellous versatility of the style, the ease, the life and the humour of those eight volumes are qualities which may well appeal to the most jaded of modern readers. Its frequent profanity, indeed, is a blot dyed too deeply into the texture of the book to be eradicable by any editor. But, apart from this, to the bored person—always in search of a new literary sensation, of something which has not been done a thousand times before, of something that will not be done a thousand times again—may be well recommended a volume of “The Philosophical Dictionary.”