Provence is in arms,” he wrote to his friend Fauris de St. Vincent, “and here am I quite quietly in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of the province are.  Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence.”  Before his friend’s answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained in his chimney-corner, where he soon expired, leaving amongst the public, and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression of great promise sadly extinguished.  “It was his fate,” says his faithful biographer, M. Gilbert, “to be always opening his wings and to be unable to take flight.”

Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight.  After several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had been elected to it in 1746.  In 1750, he offered himself at one and the same time for the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Inscriptions; he failed in both candidatures.  This mishap filled the cup of his ill-humor.  For a long time past Frederick II. had been offering the poet favors which he had long refused.  The disgust he experienced at Paris through his insatiable vanity made him determine upon seeking another arena; after having accepted a pension and a place from the King of Prussia, Voltaire set out for Berlin.

But lately allied to France, to which he was ere long to deal such heavy blows, Frederick II. was French by inclination, in literature and in philosophy; he was a bad German scholar; he always wrote and spoke in French, and his court was the resort of the cultivated French wits too bold in their views to live in peace at Paris.  Maupertuis, La Mettrie, and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin.  He was received there with enthusiasm and as sovereign of the little court of philosophers.  “A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers,” he wrote in a letter to Paris, “no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy, poetry, a hero who is a philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses, trumpets and violins, Plato’s symposium, society and freedom!  Who would believe it?  It is all true, however!” Voltaire found his duties as chamberlain very light.  “It is Caesar, it is Marcus Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe Chaulieu, with whom I sup; there is the charm of retirement, there is the freedom of the country, with all those little delights of life which a lord of a castle who is a king can procure for his very obedient humble servants and guests.  My own duties are to do nothing.  I enjoy my leisure.  I give an hour a day to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I am his grammarian, not his chamberlain.  The rest of the day is my own, and the evening ends with a pleasant supper. . . .  Never in any place in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt.  God is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are treated unsparingly.”