as far as Pont Royal."

Thus is described in the words of an eye-witness the last triumph of an
existence that had been one of ceaseless agitation, owing to Voltaire
himself far more than to the national circumstances and events of the
time at which he lived. His anxious vanity and the inexhaustible
movement of his mind had kept him constantly fluctuating between
alternations of intoxication and despair; he had the good fortune to die
at the very pinnacle of success and renown, the only immortality he could
comprehend or desire, at the outset of a new and hopeful reign; he did
not see, he had never apprehended the terrible catastrophe to which he
had been thoughtlessly contributing for sixty years. A rare piece of
good fortune and one which might be considered too great, if the limits
of eternal justice rested upon earth and were to be measured by our
compass.

Voltaire's incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he
contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity,
justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the
eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat,
brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as
yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of
common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his
friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes;
his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences
which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the
Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his
disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to
them. Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and
stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep
yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul,
which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time. At
the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the
chaos it caused in men's souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which
remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France
of our day. The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian than
materialistic.

Other influences, more sincere and at the same time more dangerous, were
simultaneously undermining men's minds. The group of Encyclopaedists,