THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE 167
appeared Frederick burst into flame, and Voltaire fled from the con-
flagration.
At Frankfort, though in territory quite outside Frederick's jurisdiction,
he was overtaken and arrested by the King's agents, and told that he could
not go on until he surrendered Frederick's poem, the Palladium, which
had not been adapted for polite society, and out-Pucelled Voltaire's
Pucelle itself. But the terrible manuscript was in a trunk which had been
lost on the way; and for weeks, till it came, Voltaire was kept almost in
prison. A book-seller to whom he owed something thought it an opportune
moment to come and press for the payment of his bill; Voltaire, furious,
gave him a blow on the ear; whereupon Voltaire's secretary, Collini, offered
comfort to the man by pointing out, "Sir, you have received a box
on the ear from one of the greatest men in the world." 35
Freed at last, he was about to cross the frontier into France, when word
came that he was exiled. The hunted old soul hardly knew where to turn;
for a time he thought of going to Pennsylvania one may imagine his
desperation. He spent the March of 1754 seeking "an agreeable tomb" in
the neighborhood of Geneva, safe from the rival autocrats of Paris and
Berlin; at last he bought an old estate called Les Delices; settled down to
cultivate his garden and regain his health; and when his life seemed to be
ebbing away into senility, entered upon the greatest
period of his noblest and
work.
V. LES DLICES: THE ESSAY ON MORALS
What was the cause of his new exile? That he had published in Berlin
"the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and
the most daring of his works." 36 Its title was no small part of it: Essai
3
sur les moeurs et I esprit des Nations, et sur Us principaux faits de Vhistoire
depuis Charlemagne jusqu'd Louis XIII an Essay on the Morah and
the Spirit of the Nations fom Charlemagne to Louis XIII. He had begun
it at Cirey for Mme. du Chatelet, spurred on to the task by her denuncia-
tion of history as she is writ.
It is "an old almanac/' she had said. "What does it matter to me, a
Frenchwoman living on my estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin
in Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Ortogrul? I have read with
offered me
pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans; they
certain pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet been able
to finish any long history of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything
in them but confusion; a host of minute events without connection
or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced a
study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it."
Voltaire had agreed; he had made his Ingenu say, "History is nothing
^Morley, 146.
S6
Tallen1yre, 291.