blic, to fall naturally into the proper tone, the discreet
ways, the winning half-smile of the well-bred man who, introducing his
readers into his mind, does them the honors of the place. Are you on
familiar terms with him, and of the small private circle in which he
freely unbends himself, with closed doors? You never tire of laughing.
With a sure hand and without seeming to touch it, he abruptly tears
aside the veil hiding a wrong, a prejudice, a folly, in short, any human
idolatry. The real figure, misshapen, odious or dull, suddenly appears
in this instantaneous flash; we shrug our shoulders. This is the
risibility of an agile, triumphant reason. We have another in that
of the gay temperament, of the droll improvisator, of the man keeping
youthful, a child, a boy even to the day of his death, and who "gambols
on his own tombstone." He is fond of caricature, exaggerating the
features of faces, bringing grotesques on the stage,[4126] walking them
about in all lights like marionettes, never weary of taking them up
and of making them dance in new costumes; in the very midst of his
philosophy, of his propaganda and polemics, he sets up his portable
theater in full blast, exhibiting oddities, the scholar, the monk, the
inquisitor, Maupertuis, Pompignan, Nonotte, Freron, King David, and
countless others who appear before us, capering and gesticulating in
their harlequin attire.--When a farcical talent is thus moved to tell
the truth, humor becomes all-powerful; for it gratifies the profound and
universal instincts of human nature: to the malicious curiosity, to the
desire to mock and belitte, to the aversion to being in need or under
constraint, those sources of bad moods which task convention, etiquette
and social obligation with wearing the burdensome cloak of respect and
of decency; moments occur in life when the wisest is not sorry to throw
this half aside and even cast it off entirely.--On each page, now with
the bold stroke of a hardy naturalist, now with the quick turn of a
mischievous monkey, Voltaire lets the solemn or serious drapery fall,
disclosing man, the poor biped, and in which attitudes![4127] Swift
alone dared to present similar pictures. What physiological crudities
relating to the origin and end of our most exalted sentiments! What
disproportion between such feeble reason and such powerful instincts!
What recesses in the wardrobes of politics and religion concealing their
foul linen! We laugh at all this