result of constant extravagance and war; but so powerful was the habit of submission, acquired in a reign already of unusual length, and so imposing the authority and the personal bearing of the old monarch, that, though the people manifested a natural if somewhat indecent joy when he died in 1715, he remained to the last every inch a king.
It was in this priest-ridden phase of his reign that Voltaire's boyhood was passed. He was born in 1694, the second son of M. François Arouet, "who," says St Simon, the famous chronicler of the time, "was notary to my father, to whom I have often seen him bring papers to sign." M. Arouet lived in Paris, with a country house at Chatenay, a few miles from the capital. When François Arouet (Voltaire) was about ten he was sent to the College (now Lycée) Louis le Grand, in the Rue St Jacques, where he was educated for the law. The boarders, of whom he was one, numbered among them youths of the best families in the country, and he formed friendships here which proved constant and serviceable. Although the Jesuits took extreme care to select the best men that the Order could produce to conduct the educational course of this the chief of their colleges, yet the training did not satisfy Voltaire, who long afterwards, when the Jesuits were suppressed in France, gave a satirical account of it in the dialogue between an ex-Jesuit and a former pupil. Much more than the needful time was, he says, taken up in learning the classics, because the method was so faulty. Mathematics, history, geography, philosophy, were altogether neglected. Nevertheless, he was taught the classics well; and he omits, in the satirical dialogue, to mention the
