When he was old and suffering, he said to Madame Necker, in one of those fits of melancholy to which he was subject, “The thinking faculty is lost just like the eating, drinking, and digesting faculties.  The marionettes of Providence, in fact, are not made to last so long as It.”  In his dying hour Voltaire was seen showing more concern for terrestrial scandals than for the terrors of conscience, crying aloud for a priest, and, with his mouth full of the blood he spat, still repeating in a half whisper, “I don’t want to be thrown into the kennel.”  A sad confession of the insufficiency of his convictions and of the inveterate levity of his thoughts; he was afraid of the judgment of man without dreading the judgment of God.  Thus was revealed the real depth of an infidelity of which Voltaire himself perhaps had not calculated the extent and the fatal influences.

Voltaire was destined to die at Paris; there he found the last joys of his life and there he shed the last rays of his glory.  For the twenty-seven years during which he had been away from it he had worked much, written much, done much.  Whilst almost invariably disavowing his works, he had furnished philosophy with pointed and poisoned weapons against religion; he had devoted to humanity much time and strength; one of the last delights he had tasted was the news of the decree which cleared the memory of M. de Lally; he had received into his house, educated and found a husband for the grand-niece of the great Corneille; he had applied the inexhaustible resources of his mind at one time to good and at another to evil, with almost equal ardor; he was old, he was ill, yet this same ardor still possessed him when he arrived at Paris on the 10th of February, 1778.  The excitement caused by his return was extraordinary.  “This new prodigy has stopped all other interest for some time,” writes Grimm; it has put an end to rumors of war, intrigues in civil life, squabbles at court.  Encyclopeadic pride appeared diminished by half, the Sorbonne shook all over, the Parliament kept silence; all the literary world is moved, all Paris is ready to fly to the idol’s feet.”  So much attention and so much glory had been too much for the old man.  Voltaire was dying; in his fright he had sent for a priest and had confessed; when he rose from his bed by a last effort of the marvellous elasticity, inherent in his body and his mind, he resumed for a while the course of his triumphs.  “M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the Academy and at the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches to the Academy besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him, pass and then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated plaudits and acclamations.  The Academy came out into the first room to meet him, an honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even to the foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.  The homage he received at the Academy was merely the