one has sucked the orange, one throws away the skin,’ somebody told Voltaire that the King had said, on being asked how much longer he would put up with the poet’s vagaries.  And Frederick, on his side, was informed that Voltaire, when a batch of the royal verses were brought to him for correction, had burst out with ’Does the man expect me to go on washing his dirty linen for ever?’ Each knew well enough the weak spot in his position, and each was acutely and uncomfortably conscious that the other knew it too.  Thus, but a very few weeks after Voltaire’s arrival, little clouds of discord become visible on the horizon; electrical discharges of irritability began to take place, growing more and more frequent and violent as time goes on; and one can overhear the pot and the kettle, in strictest privacy, calling each other black.  ‘The monster,’ whispers Voltaire to Madame Denis, ’he opens all our letters in the post’—­Voltaire, whose light-handedness with other people’s correspondence was only too notorious.  ‘The monkey,’ mutters Frederick, ’he shows my private letters to his friends’—­Frederick, who had thought nothing of betraying Voltaire’s letters to the Bishop of Mirepoix.  ‘How happy I should be here,’ exclaims the callous old poet, ’but for one thing—­his Majesty is utterly heartless!’ And meanwhile Frederick, who had never let a farthing escape from his close fist without some very good reason, was busy concocting an epigram upon the avarice of Voltaire.

It was, indeed, Voltaire’s passion for money which brought on the first really serious storm.  Three months after his arrival in Berlin, the temptation to increase his already considerable fortune by a stroke of illegal stock-jobbing proved too strong for him; he became involved in a series of shady financial transactions with a Jew; he quarrelled with the Jew; there was an acrimonious lawsuit, with charges and countercharges of the most discreditable kind; and, though the Jew lost his case on a technical point, the poet certainly did not leave the court without a stain upon his character.  Among other misdemeanours, it is almost certain—­the evidence is not quite conclusive—­that he committed forgery in order to support a false oath.  Frederick was furious, and for a moment was on the brink of dismissing Voltaire from Berlin.  He would have been wise if he had done so.  But he could not part with his beau genie so soon.  He cracked his whip, and, setting the monkey to stand in the corner, contented himself with a shrug of the shoulders and the exclamation ’C’est l’affaire d’un fripon qui a voulu tromper un filou.’  A few weeks later the royal favour shone forth once more, and Voltaire, who had been hiding himself in a suburban villa, came out and basked again in those refulgent beams.