the foremost ranks; it
is he who shouts to Diderot, "Squelch the thing (_Ecrasez l'infame_)!"
The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march
out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and
free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia,
Voltaire marches with them.

The _Essai sur l'Histoire generale et les Moeurs_ was one of the first
broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade. "Voltaire will never
write a good history," Montesquieu used to say: "he is like the monks,
who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory
of their order: Voltaire writes for his convent." The same intention
betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the
hermitage of Delices, the poem on _Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne,_
the drama of _Socrate,_ the satire of the _Pauvre Diable,_ the sad story
of _Candide,_ led the way to a series of publications every day more and
more violent against the Christian faith. The tragedy of _L' Orphelin de
la Chine_ and that of _Tancrede,_ the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc
de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the
devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of
philosophers. Definitively installed at Ferney, Voltaire took to
building, planting, farming. He established round his castle a small
industrial colony, for whose produce he strove to get a market
everywhere. "Our design," he used to say, "is to ruin the trade of
Geneva in a pious spirit." Ferney, moreover, held grand and numerously
attended receptions; Madame Denis played her uncle's pieces on a stage
which the latter had ordered to be built, and which caused as much
disquietude to the austere Genevese as to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was
on account of Voltaire's theatrical representations that Rousseau wrote
his _Lettre centre les Spectacles_. "I love you not, sir," wrote
Rousseau to Voltaire: "you have done me such wrongs as were calculated to
touch me most deeply. You have ruined Geneva in requital of the asylum
you have found there." Geneva was about to banish Rousseau before long,
and Voltaire had his own share of responsibility in this act of severity
so opposed to his general and avowed principles. Voltaire was angry with
Rousseau, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause of philosophy; he
was, as usual, hurried away by the passion of the moment, when he wr