much ardor disquieted
Chevalier de Rohan and his family; his uncle, the cardinal, took
precautions. The lieutenant of police wrote to the officer of the watch,
"Sir, his Highness is informed that Chevalier de Rohan is going away
to-day, and, as he might have some fresh affair with Sieur de Voltaire,
or the latter might do something rash, his desire is for you to see that
nothing comes of it."

Voltaire anticipated the intentions of the lieutenant of police he
succeeded in sending a challenge to Chevalier de Rohan; the latter
accepted it for the next day; he even chose his ground: but before the
hour fixed, Voltaire was arrested and taken to the Bastille; he remained
there a month. Public opinion was beginning to pity him. Marshal
Villars writes in his memoirs,--

"The chevalier was very much inconvenienced by a fall which did not admit
of his handling a sword. He took the course of having a caning
administered in broad day to Voltaire, who, instead of adopting legal
proceedings, thought vengeance by arms more noble. It is asserted that
he sought it diligently, but too indiscreetly. Cardinal Rohan asked M.
le Duc to have him put in the Bastille: orders to that effect were given
and executed, and the poor poet, after being beaten, was imprisoned into
the bargain. The public, whose inclination is to blame everybody and
everything, justly considered, in this case, that everybody was in the
wrong; Voltaire, for having offended Chevalier de Rohan; the latter, for
having dared to commit a crime worthy of death in causing a citizen to be
beaten; the government, for not having punished a notorious misdeed, and
for having put the beatee in the Bastille to tranquillize the beater."

Voltaire left the Bastille on the 3d of May, 1726, and was accompanied by
an exon to Calais, having asked as a favor to be sent to England; but
scarcely had he set foot on English territory, scarcely had he felt
himself free, when the recurring sense of outraged honor made him take
the road back to France. "I confess to you, my dear Theriot," he wrote
to one of his friends, "that I made a little trip to Paris a short time
ago. As I did not call upon you, you will easily conclude that I did not
call upon anybody. I was in search of one man only, whom his dastardly
instinct kept concealed from me, as if he guessed that I was on his
track. At last the fear of being discovered made me depart more
precipitately than I had come. That is the fa