destruction of Lisbon, which I imagined to be
sent by the author. This made it necessary I should write to him and
speak of his composition. I did so, and my letter was a long time
afterwards printed without my consent, as I shall hereafter have occasion
to remark.

Struck by seeing this poor man overwhelmed, if I may so speak, with
prosperity and honor, bitterly exclaiming against the miseries of this
life, and finding everything to be wrong, I formed the mad project of
making him turn his attention to himself, and of proving to him that
everything was right. Voltaire, while he appeared to believe in God,
never really believed in anything but the devil; since his pretended
deity is a malicious being, who, according to him, had no pleasure but in
evil. The glaring absurdity of this doctrine is particularly disgusting
from a man enjoying the greatest prosperity; who, from the bosom of
happiness, endeavors, by the frightful and cruel image of all the
calamities from which he is exempt, to reduce his fellow creatures to
despair. I, who had a better right than he to calculate and weigh all
the evils of human life, impartially examine them, and proved to him that
of all possible evils there was not one to be attributed to Providence,
and which had not its source rather in the abusive use man made of his
faculties than in nature. I treated him, in this letter, with the
greatest respect and delicacy possible. Yet, knowing his self-love to be
extremely irritable, I did not send the letter immediately to himself,
but to Doctor Tronchin, his physician and friend, with full power either
to give it him or destroy it. Voltaire informed me in a few lines that
being ill, having likewise the care of a sick person, he postponed his
answer until some future day, and said not a word on the subject.
Tronchin, when he sent me the letter, inclosed in it another, in which he
expressed but very little esteem for the person from whom he received it.

I have never published, nor even shown, either of these two letters, not
liking to make a parade of such little triumphs; but the originals are in
my collections. Since that time Voltaire has published the answer he
promised me, but which I never received. This is the novel of 'Candide',
of which I cannot speak because I have not read it.

All these interruptions ought to have cured me of my fantastic amours,
and they were perhaps the means offered me by Heaven to prevent their
destruc