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CHAPTER III.
UNDER THE REGENCY.
When he was twenty-one a great change occurred with the death of the old king. It would be curious to speculate what Voltaire might have become had Louis died at eighty-seven instead of at seventy-seven. The gloom of the Court extended over the literature as well as over the mind and manners of France. It deepened as the king grew older and more devout: his confessor, Letellier, a morose and cruel bigot, urged him to fresh persecutions; it was the Jansenists (a sect into whose peculiar Calvinistic tenets, founded on distinctions which would hardly now appear rational or intelligible, it is not needful here to inquire) who were then the objects of the fury of the Jesuits, and the prisons were full of them. All literary works which appeared at this time had a tinge of devotion, and free-thinking would have been the most perilous of modes of thought. In these circumstances, Madame de Maintenon might have set Voltaire, as she had formerly set Racine, to compose Scriptural dramas for the religious improvement of the courtly audience; and had he complied, he would have been guilty of no more hypocrisy than many around
