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Voltaire’s vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good. Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society’s needs.

A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man down.

Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds–those who are innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class, I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.

Voltaire had been a favorite of various women–usually married ladies, and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty years before the American put out his famous advice, “If you must fall in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at least a homely one–for only such are grateful.”

In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the same time, Voltaire said: “This is a mistake: there is at least three days’ difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month.”

Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. “Gossip isn’t busy with the plain women–that is why I like you,” he once said to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame’s reply was, we do not know, but probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of voice by the right person.

The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs, at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer’s income was sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.

From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do next.

Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets–to get in line and shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as anarchists.

Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i’ faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse it of its secret faults.

In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier’s wit was no match for the other’s rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise him soundly with rattans.