on-official) could not
fail, as an ovation, from the King;--so report the French Biographers.
But there was, besides, strict promise that the Piece should be
suppressed: "Never do to send our President pirouetting through the
world in this manner, with his wig on fire; promise me, on your honor!"
Voltaire promised. But, alas, how could Voltaire perform! Once more
the Rhadamanthine fact is: Voltaire, as King's Chamberlain, was bound,
without any promise, to forbear, and rigidly suppress such an AKAKIA
against the King's Perpetual President. But withal let candid readers
consider how difficult it was to do. The absurd blusterous Turkey-cock,
who has, every now and then, been tyrannizing over you for twenty years,
here you have him filled with gunpowder, so to speak, and the train
laid. There wants but one spark,--(edition printed in Holland,
edition done in Berlin, plenty of editions made or makable by a little
surreptitious legerdemain,--and I never knew whether it was AKAKIA in
print, or AKAKIA in manuscript, that King and King's Chamberlain
were now reading together, nor does it matter much):--your Turkey
surreptitiously stuffed with gunpowder, I say; train ready waiting; one
flint-spark will shoot him aloft, scatter him as flaming ruin on all the
winds: and you are, once and always, to withhold said spark. Perhaps,
had AKAKIA not yet been written--But all lies ready there; one spark
will do it, at any moment;--and there are unguarded moments, and the
Tempter must prevail!--

On what day AKAKIA blazed out at Berlin, surreptitiously forwarded
from Holland or otherwise, I could never yet learn (so stupid these
reporters). But "on November 2d" the King makes a Visit to sick
Maupertuis, which is published in all the Newspapers; [Rodenbeck, IN
DIE;--Helden-Geschichte,--iii. 531, "2d November, 1752, 5 P.M."]--and
one might guess the AKAKIA conflagration, and cruel haha-ings of
mankind, to have been tacitly the cause. Then or later, sure enough,
AKAKIA does blaze aloft about that time; and all Berlin, and all the
world, is in conversation over Maupertuis and it,--30,000 copies sold
in Paris:--and Friedrich naturally was in a towering passion at his
Chamberlain. Nothing for the Chamberlain but to fly his presence;
to shriek, piteously, "Accident, your Majesty! Fatal treachery and
accident; after such precautions too!"--and fall sick to death (which
is always a resource one has); and get into private lodgings in the
TAUBEN-STR