mber any of your version of the Radamiste?"

"I remember it all."

"You have a wonderful memory; I should be glad to hear it."

I began to recite the same scene that I had recited to Crebillon ten
years before, and I thought M. de Voltaire listened with pleasure.

"It doesn't strike one as at all harsh," said he.

This was the highest praise he would give me. In his turn the great man
recited a passage from Tancred which had not as yet been published, and
which was afterwards considered, and rightly, as a masterpiece.

We should have got on very well if we had kept to that, but on my quoting
a line of Horace to praise one of his pieces, he said that Horace was a
great master who had given precepts which would never be out of date.
Thereupon I answered that he himself had violated one of them, but that
he had violated it grandly.

"Which is that?"

"You do not write, 'Contentus paucis lectoribus'."

"If Horace had had to combat the hydra-headed monster of superstition, he
would have written as I have written--for all the world."

"It seems to me that you might spare yourself the trouble of combating
what you will never destroy."

"That which I cannot finish others will, and I shall always have the
glory of being the first in the field."

"Very good; but supposing you succeed in destroying superstition, what
are you going to put in its place?"

"I like that. If I deliver the race of man from a wild beast which is
devouring it, am I to be asked what I intend to put in its place?"

"It does not devour it; on the contrary, it is necessary to its
existence."

"Necessary to its existence! That is a horrible blasphemy, the falsity of
which will be seen in the future. I love the human race; I would fain see
men like myself, free and happy, and superstition and freedom cannot go
together. Where do you find an enslaved and yet a happy people?"

"You wish, then, to see the people sovereign?"

"God forbid! There must be a sovereign to govern the masses."

"In that case you must have superstition, for without it the masses will
never obey a mere man decked with the name of monarch."

"I will have no monarch; the word expresses despotism, which I hate as I
do slavery."

"What do you mean, then? If you wish to put the government in the hands
of one man, such a man, I maintain, will be a monarch."

"I would have a sovereign ruler of a free people, of which he is the
chief by an agreement which binds them both, w