bonne pour faire rire le public’; upon which, according to one account, there were exclamations from the crowd which had gathered round of ‘Ah! le bon seigneur!’ The sequel is known to everyone:  how Voltaire rushed back, dishevelled and agonised, into Sully’s dining-room, how he poured out his story in an agitated flood of words, and how that high-born company, with whom he had been living up to that moment on terms of the closest intimacy, now only displayed the signs of a frigid indifference.  The caste-feeling had suddenly asserted itself.  Poets, no doubt, were all very well in their way, but really, if they began squabbling with noblemen, what could they expect?  And then the callous and stupid convention of that still half-barbarous age—­the convention which made misfortune the proper object of ridicule—­came into play no less powerfully.  One might take a poet seriously, perhaps—­until he was whipped; then, of course, one could only laugh at him.  For the next few days, wherever Voltaire went he was received with icy looks, covert smiles, or exaggerated politeness.  The Prince de Conti, who, a month or two before, had written an ode in which he placed the author of Oedipe side by side with the authors of Le Cid and Phedre, now remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that ’ces coups de batons etaient bien recus et mal donnes.’  ’Nous serions bien malheureux,’ said another well-bred personage, as he took a pinch of snuff, ‘si les poetes n’avaient pas des epaules.’  Such friends as remained faithful were helpless.  Even Madame de Prie could do nothing.  ‘Le pauvre Voltaire me fait grande pitie,’ she said; ’dans le fond il a raison.’  But the influence of the Rohan family was too much for her, and she could only advise him to disappear for a little into the country, lest worse should befall.  Disappear he did, remaining for the next two months concealed in the outskirts of Paris, where he practised swordsmanship against his next meeting with his enemy.  The situation was cynically topsy-turvy.  As M. Foulet points out, Rohan had legally rendered himself liable, under the edict against duelling, to a long term of imprisonment, if not to the penalty of death.  Yet the law did not move, and Voltaire was left to take the only course open in those days to a man of honour in such circumstances—­to avenge the insult by a challenge and a fight.  But now the law, which had winked at Rohan, began to act against Voltaire.  The police were instructed to arrest him so soon as he should show any sign of an intention to break the peace.  One day he suddenly appeared at Versailles, evidently on the lookout for Rohan, and then as suddenly vanished.  A few weeks later, the police reported that he was in Paris, lodging with a fencing-master, and making no concealment of his desire to ’insulter incessamment et avec eclat M. le chevalier de Rohan.’  This decided the authorities, and accordingly on the night of the 17th of April, as we learn from the Police Gazette, ‘le sieur Arrouet de Voltaire, fameux poete,’ was arrested, and conducted ‘par ordre du Roi’ to the Bastille.