of Ferney in the district of Gex and that of Tourney in Burgundy.  He was henceforth fixed, free to pass from France to Switzerland and from Switzerland to France.  “I lean my left on Mount Jura,” he used to say, “my right on the Alps, and I have the beautiful Lake of Geneva in front of my camp, a beautiful castle on the borders of France, the hermitage of Delices in the territory of Geneva, a good house at Lausanne; crawling thus from one burrow to another, I escape from kings.  Philosophers should always have two or three holes under ground against the hounds that run them down.”

The perturbation of Voltaire’s soul and mind was never stilled; the anxious and undignified perturbation of his outer life at last subsided; he left off trembling, and, in the comparative security which he thought he possessed, he gave scope to all his free-thinking, which had but lately been often cloaked according to circumstances.  He had taken the communion at Colmar, to soften down the Jesuits; he had conformed to the rules of the convent of Senones, when he took refuge with Dom Calmet; at Delices he worked at the Encyclopcedia, which was then being commenced by D’Alembert and Diderot, taking upon himself in preference the religious articles, and not sparing the creed of his neighbors, the pastors of Geneva, any more than that of the Catholic church.  “I assure you that my friends and I will lead them a fine dance; they shall drink the cup to the very lees,” wrote Voltaire to D’Alembert.  In the great campaign against Christianity undertaken by the philosophers, Voltaire, so long, a wavering ally, will henceforth fight in the foremost ranks; it is he who shouts to Diderot, “Squelch the thing (Ecrasez l’infame)!” The masks are off, and the fight is barefaced; the encyclopaedists march out to the conquest of the world in the name of reason, humanity, and free-thinking; even when he has ceased to work at the Encyclopaedia, Voltaire marches with them.

The Essai sur l’Histoire generale et les Moeurs was one of the first broadsides of this new anti-religious crusade.  “Voltaire will never write a good history,” Montesquieu used to say:  “he is like the monks, who do not write for the subject of which they treat, but for the glory of their order:  Voltaire writes for his convent.”  The same intention betrayed itself in every sort of work that issued at that time from the hermitage of Delices, the poem on Le Tremblement de Terre de Lisbonne, the drama of Socrate, the satire of the Pauvre Diable, the sad story of Candide, led the way to a series of publications every day more and more violent against the Christian faith.  The tragedy of L’ Orphelin de la Chine and that of Tancrede, the quarrels with Freron, with Lefranc de Pompignan, and lastly with Jean Jacques Rousseau, did not satiate the devouring activity of the Patriarch, as he was called by the knot of philosophers.  Definitively installed