her would have
counselled profanation. The matter is important; try to get to the
bottom of so odious and dangerous a report." And, at another time, to
Abbe Morellet, "You know that Councillor Pasquier said in full Parliament
that the young men of Abbeville who were put to death had imbibed their
impiety in the school and the works of the modern philosophers. . . .
They were mentioned by name; it is a formal denunciation. . . . Wise
men, under such terrible circumstances, should keep quiet and wait."

Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself
arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge. "My
heart is withered," he exclaims, "I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and
die in some land where men are less unjust." He wrote to the Great
Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for
an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with
the persecuted philosophers. His imagination was going wild. "I went to
him," says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his;
"after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a
mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on
foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my
astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw
it was. Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into
tears, 'Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!' was all he answered. A few days
afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied
all the powers of malevolence."

Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and
disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from
the "home of society," as he had himself called Paris. In vain he wrote
to Diderot, "A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country
in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away
into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express
what you pleased, but to preach openly against superstitions as
disgraceful as they are sanguinary. You would not be solitary there; you
would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there,
the chair of truth. Your library might go by water, and there would not
be four leagues' journey by land. In fine, you would leave slavery for
freedom."

All these inducements having failed of effect,