Voltaire was now sixty years of age.  His position was an enviable one.  His reputation was very great, and he had amassed a considerable fortune, which not only assured him complete independence, but enabled him to live in his domains on the large and lavish scale of a country magnate.  His residence at Ferney, just on the border of French territory, put him beyond the reach of government interference, while he was yet not too far distant to be out of touch with the capital.  Thus the opportunity had at last come for the full display of his powers.  And those powers were indeed extraordinary.  His character was composed of a strange amalgam of all the most contradictory elements in human nature, and it would be difficult to name a single virtue or a single vice which he did not possess.  He was the most egotistical of mortals, and the most disinterested; he was graspingly avaricious, and profusely generous; he was treacherous, mischievous, frivolous, and mean, yet he was a firm friend and a true benefactor, yet he was profoundly serious and inspired by the noblest enthusiasms.  Nature had carried these contradictions even into his physical constitution.  His health was so bad that he seemed to pass his whole life on the brink of the grave; nevertheless his vitality has probably never been surpassed in the history of the world.  Here, indeed, was the one characteristic which never deserted him:  he was always active with an insatiable activity; it was always safe to say of him that, whatever else he was, he was not at rest.  His long, gaunt body, frantically gesticulating, his skull-like face, with its mobile features twisted into an eternal grin, its piercing eyes sparkling and darting—­all this suggested the appearance of a corpse galvanized into an incredible animation.  But in truth it was no dead ghost that inhabited this strange tenement, but the fierce and powerful spirit of an intensely living man.

Some signs had already appeared of the form which his activity was now about to take.  During his residence in Prussia he had completed his historical Essai sur les Moeurs, which passed over in rapid review the whole development of humanity, and closed with a brilliant sketch of the age of Louis XIV.  This work was highly original in many ways.  It was the first history which attempted to describe the march of civilization in its broadest aspects, which included a consideration of the great Eastern peoples, which dealt rather with the progress of the arts and the sciences than with the details of politics and wars.  But its chief importance lay in the fact that it was in reality, under its historical trappings, a work of propaganda.  It was a counterblast to Bossuet’s Histoire Universelle.  That book had shown the world’s history as a part of the providential order—­a grand unfolding of design.  Voltaire’s view was very different.  To him, as to Montesquieu, natural causes alone were operative in history; but this was not all; in his