se
together, everyone knows what will happen. For some time their sense of
mutual advantage may induce them to tolerate each other, but sooner or
later human nature will assert itself, and the _menage_ will break up.
And, with Voltaire and Frederick, the difficulties inherent in all such
cases were intensified by the fact that the relationship between them
was, in effect, that of servant and master; that Voltaire, under a very
thin disguise, was a paid menial, while Frederick, condescend as he
might, was an autocrat whose will was law. Thus the two famous and
perhaps mythical sentences, invariably repeated by historians of the
incident, about orange-skins and dirty linen, do in fact sum up the gist
of the matter. 'When one has sucked the orange, one throws away the
skin,' somebody told Voltaire that the King had said, on being asked how
much longer he would put up with the poet's vagaries. And Frederick, on
his side, was informed that Voltaire, when a batch of the royal verses
were brought to him for correction, had burst out with 'Does the man
expect me to go on washing his dirty linen for ever?' Each knew well
enough the weak spot in his position, and each was acutely and
uncomfortably conscious that the other knew it too. Thus, but a very few
weeks after Voltaire's arrival, little clouds of discord become visible
on the horizon; electrical discharges of irritability began to take
place, growing more and more frequent and violent as time goes on; and
one can overhear the pot and the kettle, in strictest privacy, calling
each other black. 'The monster,' whispers Voltaire to Madame Denis, 'he
opens all our letters in the post'--Voltaire, whose light-handedness
with other people's correspondence was only too notorious. 'The monkey,'
mutters Frederick, 'he shows my private letters to his
friends'--Frederick, who had thought nothing of betraying Voltaire's
letters to the Bishop of Mirepoix. 'How happy I should be here,'
exclaims the callous old poet, 'but for one thing--his Majesty is
utterly heartless!' And meanwhile Frederick, who had never let a
farthing escape from his close fist without some very good reason, was
busy concocting an epigram upon the avarice of Voltaire.

It was, indeed, Voltaire's passion for money which brought on the first
really serious storm. Three months after his arrival in Berlin, the
temptation to increase his already considerable fortune by a stroke of
illegal stock-jobbing proved too strong f