of Madame de Pompadour, had become almost as impossible as he had pretended it to have been in 1743.  Frederick eagerly repeated his invitation; and this time Voltaire did not refuse.  He was careful to make a very good bargain; obliged Frederick to pay for his journey; and arrived at Berlin in July 1750.  He was given rooms in the royal palaces both at Berlin and Potsdam; he was made a Court Chamberlain, and received the Order of Merit, together with a pension of L800 a year.  These arrangements caused considerable amusement in Paris; and for some days hawkers, carrying prints of Voltaire dressed in furs, and crying ’Voltaire le prussien!  Six sols le fameux prussien!’ were to be seen walking up and down the Quays.

The curious drama that followed, with its farcical [Greek:  peripeteia] and its tragi-comic denouement, can hardly be understood without a brief consideration of the feelings and intentions of the two chief actors in it.  The position of Frederick is comparatively plain.  He had now completely thrown aside the last lingering remnants of any esteem which he may once have entertained for the character of Voltaire.  He frankly thought him a scoundrel.  In September 1749, less than a year before Voltaire’s arrival, and at the very period of Frederick’s most urgent invitations, we find him using the following language in a letter to Algarotti:  ‘Voltaire vient de faire un tour qui est indigne.’ (He had been showing to all his friends a garbled copy of one of Frederick’s letters).

Il meriterait d’etre fleurdelise au Parnasse.  C’est bien dommage qu’une ame aussi lache soit unie a un aussi beau genie.  Il a les gentillesses et les malices d’un singe.  Je vous conterai ce que c’est, lorsque je vous reverrai; cependant je ne ferai semblant de rien, car j’en ai besoin pour l’etude de l’elocution francaise.  On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scelerat.  Je veux savoir son francais; que m’importe sa morale?  Cet homme a trouve le moyen de reunir tous les contraires.  On admire son esprit, en meme temps qu’on meprise son caractere.

There is no ambiguity about this.  Voltaire was a scoundrel; but he was a scoundrel of genius.  He would make the best possible teacher of l’elocution francaise; therefore it was necessary that he should come and live in Berlin.  But as for anything more—­as for any real interchange of sympathies, any genuine feeling of friendliness, of respect, or even of regard—­all that was utterly out of the question.  The avowal is cynical, no doubt; but it is at any rate straightforward, and above all it is peculiarly devoid of any trace of self-deception.  In the face of these trenchant sentences, the view of Frederick’s attitude which is suggested so assiduously by Carlyle—­that he was the victim of an elevated misapprehension, that he was always hoping for the best, and that, when the explosion came he was very much surprised and profoundly disappointed—­becomes obviously untenable.  If any man ever acted with his eyes wide open, it was Frederick when he invited Voltaire to Berlin.