latter. But these two masters of English were not perhaps the best qualified to relate the story. Both were unjust to Voltaire, and Macaulay was unjust to Frederick as well. It is certain that at first the king behaved altogether like a king to his guest. He pressed him to remain; he gave him (the words are Voltaire's own) one of his orders, twenty thousand francs a year, and four thousand additional for his niece, Madame Denis, in case she would come and keep house for her uncle. But Voltaire's conduct was from the first Voltairian. He insisted on the consent of his own king, which was given without delay. But Frenchmen, always touchy on such a point, regarded Voltaire as something of a deserter; and it was not long before he bitterly repented his desertion, though his residence in Prussia lasted nearly three years. It was quite impossible that Voltaire and Frederick should get on together for long. Voltaire was not humble enough to be a mere butt, as many of Frederick's led poets were; he was not enough of a gentleman to hold his own place with dignity and discretion; he was constantly jealous both of his equals in age and reputation, such as Maupertuis, and of his juniors and inferiors, such as Baculard D'Arnaud. He was greedy, restless, and in a way Bohemian. Frederick, though his love of teasing for teasing's sake has been exaggerated by Macaulay, was a martinet of the first water, had a sharp though one-sided idea of justice, and had not the slightest intention of allowing Voltaire to insult or to tyrannize over his other guests and servants. If he is to be blamed in this particular matter, the blame must be chiefly confined to his imprudence in inviting Voltaire at the beginning and to the brutality of his conduct at the end. Within Voltaire there was always a mischievous and ill-behaved child; and he was never more mischievous, more ill-behaved and more childish than in these years. He tried to get D'Arnaud exiled, and succeeded. He got into a quite unnecessary quarrel with Lessing. He had not been in the country six months before he engaged in a discreditable piece of financial gambling with Hirsch, the Dresden Jew. He was accused of something like downright forgery—that is to say, of altering a paper signed by Hirsch after he had signed it. The king's disgust at this affair (which came to an open scandal before the tribunals) was so great that he was on the point of ordering Voltaire out of Prussia, and Darget the secretary had no small trouble in arranging the matter (February 1751). Then it was Voltaire's turn to be disgusted with an occupation he had undertaken himself—the occupation of “buckwashing” the king's French verses. However, he succeeded in finishing and printing the Siècle de Louis XIV., while the Dictionnaire philosophique is said to have been devised and begun at Potsdam. But Voltaire's restless temper was brewing up for another storm. In the early autumn of 1751 La Mettrie, one of the king's parasites, and a man of much more talent than is generally allowed, horrified Voltaire by telling him that Frederick had in conversation applied to him (Voltaire) a proverb about “sucking the orange and flinging away its skin,” and about the same time the dispute with Maupertuis, which had more than anything else to do with his exclusion from Prussia, came to a head. Maupertuis got into a dispute with one König. The king took his president's part; Voltaire took König's. But Maupertuis must needs write his Letters, and thereupon (1752) appeared one of Voltaire's most famous, though perhaps not one of his most read works, the Diatribe du Docteur Akakia. Even Voltaire did not venture to publish this lampoon on a great official of a prince so touchy as the king of Prussia without some permission, and if all tales are true he obtained this by another piece of something like forgery—getting the king to endorse a totally different pamphlet on its last leaf, and affixing that last leaf to Akakia. Of this Frederick was not aware; but he did get some wind of the Diatribe itself, sent for the author, heard it read to his own great amusement, and either actually burned the MS. or believed that it was burnt. In a few days printed copies appeared. Frederick did not like disobedience, but he still less liked being made a fool of, and he put Voltaire under arrest. But again the affair blew over, the king believing that the edition Akakia confiscated in Prussia was the only one. Alas! Voltaire had sent copies away; others had been printed, abroad; and the thing was irrecoverable. It could not be proved that he had ordered the printing, and all Frederick could do was to have the pamphlet burnt by the hangman. Things were now drawing to a crisis. One day Voltaire sent his orders, &c., back; the next Frederick returned them, but Voltaire had quite made up his mind to fly. A kind of reconciliation occurred in March, and after some days of good-fellowship Voltaire at last obtained the long-sought leave of absence and left Potsdam on the 26th of the month (1753). It was nearly three months afterwards that the famous, ludicrous and brutal arrest was made at Frankfort, on the persons of himself and his niece, who had met him meanwhile. There was some faint excuse for Frederick's wrath. In the first place, the poet chose to linger at Leipzig. In the second place, in direct disregard of a promise given to Frederick, a supplement to Akakia appeared, more offensive than the main text. From Leipzig, after a month's stay, Voltaire moved to Gotha. Once more, on the 25th of May, he moved on to Frankfort. Frankfort, nominally a free city, but with a Prussian resident who did very much what he pleased, was not like Gotha and Leipzig. An excuse was provided in the fact that the poet had a copy of some unpublished poems of Frederick's, and as soon as Voltaire arrived hands were laid on him, at first with courtesy enough. The resident, Freytag, was not a very wise person (though he probably did not, as Voltaire would have it, spell “poésie” “poeshie”); constant references to Frederick were necessary; and the affair was prolonged so that Madame Denis had time to join her uncle. At last Voltaire tried to steal away. He was followed, arrested, his niece seized separately, and sent to join him in custody; and the two, with the secretary Collini, were kept close prisoners at an inn called the Goat. This situation was at last put an end to by the city authorities, who probably felt that they were not playing a very creditable part. Voltaire left Frankfort on the 7th of July, travelled safely to Mainz, and thence to Mannheim, Strassburg and Colmar. The last-named place he reached (after a leisurely journey and many honours at the little courts just mentioned) at the beginning of October, and here he proposed to stay the winter, finish his Annals of the Empire and look about him.
Voltaire's second stage was now over. Even now, however in his sixtieth year, it required some more external pressure to induce him to make himself independent. He had been, in the first blush of his Frankfort disaster, refused, or at least not granted, permission even to enter France proper. At Colmar he was not safe, especially when in January 1754 a pirated edition of the Essai sur les mœurs, written long before, appeared. Permission to establish himself in France was now absolutely refused. Nor did an extremely offensive performance of Voltaire's—the solemn partaking of the Eucharist at Colmar after due confession—at all mollify his enemies. His exclusion from France, however, was chiefly metaphorical, and really meant exclusion from Paris and its neighbourhood. In the summer he went to Plombières, and after returning to Colmar for some time journeyed in the beginning of winter to Lyons, and thence in the middle of December to Geneva. Voltaire had no purpose of remaining in the city, and almost immediately bought a country house just outside the gates, to which he gave the name of Les Délices. He was here practically at the meeting-point of four distinct jurisdictions—Geneva, the canton Vaud, Sardinia and France, while other cantons were within easy reach; and he bought other houses dotted about these territories, so as never to be without a refuge close at hand in case of sudden storms. At Les Délices he set up a considerable establishment, which his great wealth made him able easily to afford. He kept open house for visitors; he had printers close at hand in Geneva; he fitted up a private theatre in which he could enjoy what was perhaps the greatest pleasure of his whole life—acting in a play of his
