r heirs
so much at your death.

The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
control--but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised
and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
mathematics.

Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
canceled.

Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
until his death.

On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.

* * * * *

Madame du Chatelet--the divine Emilie--was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
thirty-nine when they first met.

He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
his last book that could be found.

The Madame called on him to express her sympathy--and congratulations.
She had written a book, but it had not been burned--not even read! She
was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.

She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.

She had met Voltaire when she was a child--at least she said so, and he,
being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
manuscript she had