eventy, broken on the wheel, as suspected, without evidence, and
against accumulated impossibilities, of murdering his own son, a young
man of about thirty, by hanging him. Voltaire took up the case, and
pleaded it to the common sense, and to the human feeling, of France,
with immense effectiveness. It is, in truth, Voltaire's advocacy of
righteousness, in this instance of incredible wrong, that has made the
instance itself immortal. His part in the case of Calas, though the most
signal, is not the only, example of Voltaire's literary knighthood. He
hated oppression, and he loved liberty, for himself and for all men,
with a passion as deep and as constant as any passion of which nature
had made Voltaire capable. If the liberty that he loved was
fundamentally liberty as against God no less than as against men, and
if the oppression that he hated was fundamentally the oppression of
being put under obligation to obey Christ as lord of life and of
thought, this was something of which, probably, Voltaire never had a
clear consciousness.

We have now indicated what was most admirable in Voltaire's personal
character. On the whole, he was far from being an admirable man. He was
vain, he was shallow, he was frivolous, he was deceitful, he was
voluptuous, he fawned on the great, he abased himself before them, he
licked the dust on which they stood. "_Trajan, est-il content?_" ("Is
Trajan satisfied?")--this, asked, in nauseous adulation, and nauseous
self-abasement, by Voltaire of Louis XV., so little like Trajan in
character--is monumental. The occasion was the production of a piece of
Voltaire's written at the instance of Louis XV.'s mistress, the infamous
Madame de Pompadour. The king, for answer, simply gorgonized the poet
with a stony Bourbon stare.

But, taken altogether, Voltaire's life was a great success. He got on in
the world, was rich, was fortunate, was famous, was gay, if he was not
happy. He had his friendship with the great Frederick of Prussia, who
filled for his false French flatterer a return cup of sweetness,
cunningly mixed with exceeding bitterness. His death was an appropriate
_coup de theatre_, a felicity of finish to such a life, quite beyond the
reach of art. He came back to Paris, whence he had been an exile,
welcomed with a triumph transcending the triumph of a conqueror. They
made a great feast for him, a feast of flattery, in the theatre. The old
man was drunk with delight. The delight was too much