cloth.
His father, Francois Arouet, was a successful notary of Paris, an
honorable profession, which included all that is now done among us by
lawyers, brokers, life-insurers, and administrators of estates. Many
of the characteristics which we discover in his father, and, indeed,
in all the Arouets, survive in Voltaire. They are vivacity, thrift,
irritability, and withal a pleasing and generous disposition.

Francois Marie Arouet was the youngest child of a too prolific mother.
He was born November 21, 1694, a weakly, feeble babe whose life was
despaired of during the first year. The child was abandoned to the
care of a nurse, his mother being an invalid. She died when he reached
the age of seven. By the time the infant was two years old he began to
thrive, and grew into an active, healthy child. Not robust, he was,
nevertheless, wiry, and endowed with nervous energy.

His earliest instruction was from the Abbe de Chateauneuf, who taught
him belles lettres and deism. At a very early age the little lad
exhibited a precocious talent for versification. When ten years old he
was sent to the College Louis-le-Grand. Here he remained until he was
seventeen, receiving an education which, though always depreciated by
him, provided the basis of a wide and varied knowledge. The Jesuits,
who were the instructors at this college, retained the methods of the
schools of the Renaissance, in which plays in Latin and French were
enacted by the scholars. This may explain his life-long devotion to
the drama.

His remarkable poetic talent led to an introduction, when he was but
eleven years old, to Ninon de l'Enclos, who, in her nineteenth year,
was the leader of a brilliant coterie of society. This unaccountable
and marvellous woman was so pleased with the lad that she left him a
legacy of two thousand livres "to buy books with."

When his college days were ended his troubles began. His father had
determined to make him a notary. The youth wanted to follow
literature, which the father regarded as equal to no profession at
all. The father triumphed in so far as securing the young man's
consent to begin the study of law. He began but never proceeded, and
gave himself to everything but the pursuit of legal lore. The Abbe de
Chateauneuf, the godfather of Voltaire, died before the boy's college
days were over, but before his death he introduced his pupil to the
celebrated society of the Epicureans of the Temple. Here the youth
gathered th