ired, leaving amongst the public,
and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression
of great promise sadly extinguished. "It was his fate," says his
faithful biographer, M. Gilbert, "to be always opening his wings and to
be unable to take flight."

Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight. After
several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen
ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had
been elected to it in 1746. In 1750, he offered himself at one and the
same time for the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions;
he failed in both candidatures. This mishap filled the cup of his
ill-humor. For a long time past Frederick II. had been offering the poet
favors which he had long refused. The disgust he experienced at Paris
through his insatiable vanity made him determine upon seeking another
arena; after having accepted a pension and a place from the King of
Prussia, Voltaire set out for Berlin.

But lately allied to France, to which he was ere long to deal such heavy
blows, Frederick II. was French by inclination, in literature and in
philosophy; he was a bad German scholar; he always wrote and spoke in
French, and his court was the resort of the cultivated French wits too
bold in their views to live in peace at Paris. Maupertuis, La Mettrie,
and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin. He was
received there with enthusiasm and as sovereign of the little court of
philosophers. "A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers," he
wrote in a letter to Paris, "no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy,
poetry, a hero who is a philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces,
grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, Plato's symposium, society
and freedom! Who would believe it? It is all true, however!" Voltaire
found his duties as chamberlain very light. "It is Caesar, it is Marcus
Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe Chaulieu, with whom I sup;
there is the charm of retirement, there is the freedom of the country,
with all those little delights of life which a lord of a castle who is a
king can procure for his very obedient humble servants and guests. My
own duties are to do nothing. I enjoy my leisure. I give an hour a day
to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I
am his grammarian, not his chamberlain. The rest of the day is my own,
and the evening ends wit