had taken to his bed.  ‘Un peu trop d’amour-propre,’ Frederick wrote to Darget, ’l’a rendu trop sensible aux manoeuvres d’un singe qu’il devait mepriser apres qu’on l’avait fouette.’  But now the monkey had been whipped, and doubtless all would be well.  It seems strange that Frederick should still, after more than two years of close observation, have had no notion of the material he was dealing with.  He might as well have supposed that he could stop a mountain torrent in spate with a wave of his hand, as have imagined that he could impose obedience upon Voltaire in such a crisis by means of a lecture and a threat ‘du cote de la boursse.’  Before the month was out all Germany was swarming with Akakias; thousands of copies were being printed in Holland; and editions were going off in Paris like hot cakes.  It is difficult to withold one’s admiration from the audacious old spirit who thus, on the mere strength of his mother-wits, dared to defy the enraged master of a powerful state.  ‘Votre effronterie m’etonne,’ fulminated Frederick in a furious note, when he suddenly discovered that all Europe was ringing with the absurdity of the man whom he had chosen to be the President of his favourite Academy, whose cause he had publicly espoused, and whom he had privately assured of his royal protection.  ‘Ah!  Mon Dieu, Sire,’ scribbled Voltaire on the same sheet of paper, ‘dans l’etat ou je suis!’ (He was, of course, once more dying.) ’Quoi! vous me jugeriez sans entendre!  Je demande justice et la mort.’  Frederick replied by having copies of Akakia burnt by the common hangman in the streets of Berlin.  Voltaire thereupon returned his Order, his gold key, and his pension.  It might have been supposed that the final rupture had now really come at last.  But three months elapsed before Frederick could bring himself to realise that all was over, and to agree to the departure of his extraordinary guest.  Carlyle’s suggestion that this last delay arose from the unwillingness of Voltaire to go, rather than from Frederick’s desire to keep him, is plainly controverted by the facts.  The King not only insisted on Voltaire’s accepting once again the honours which he had surrendered, but actually went so far as to write him a letter of forgiveness and reconciliation.  But the poet would not relent; there was a last week of suppers at Potsdam—­’soupers de Damocles’ Voltaire called them; and then, on March 26, 1753, the two men parted for ever.

The storm seemed to be over; but the tail of it was still hanging in the wind.  Voltaire, on his way to the waters of Plombieres, stopped at Leipzig, where he could not resist, in spite of his repeated promises to the contrary, the temptation to bring out a new and enlarged edition of Akakia.  Upon this Maupertuis utterly lost his head:  he wrote to Voltaire, threatening him with personal chastisement.  Voltaire issued yet another edition of Akakia, appended a somewhat unauthorised version of the President’s