’Tu vois le sage courageux
    Dont l’heureux et male genie
    Arracha le tonnerre aux dieux
    Et le sceptre a la tyrannie.’

If you find these verses sufficiently supportable, so that people will not laugh at me, you can put them into the Paris paper, even with my name.  I shall honor myself in rendering this homage to Franklin, but on condition that you find the verses printable.  As I make no pretension on account of them, I shall be perfectly content, if you reject them as bad.

    “The third verse can be put,—­A ravi le tonnerre aux cieux, or
    aux dieux.”

From this letter it appears that the critical judgment of La Harpe, confirmed by D’Alembert, sided for sceptrumque as better than mox sceptra.

But the verse of Turgot was not alone in its testimony.  There was an incident precisely contemporaneous, which shows how completely France had fallen under the fascination of the American cause.  Voltaire, the acknowledged chief of French literature in the brilliant eighteenth century, after many years of busy exile at Ferney, in the neighborhood of Geneva, where he had wielded his far-reaching sceptre, was induced, in his old age, to visit Paris once again before he died.  He left his Swiss retreat on the sixth of February, 1778, the very day on which Franklin signed the Alliance with France, and after a journey which resembled the progress of a sovereign, he reached Paris on the twelfth of February.  He was at once surrounded by the homage of all that was most illustrious in literature and science, while the theatre, grateful for his contributions to the drama, vied with the Academy.  But there were two characters on whom the patriarch, as he was fondly called, lavished a homage of his own.  He had already addressed to Turgot a most remarkable epistle in verse, the mood of which may be seen in its title, “Epitre a un Homme”; but on seeing the discarded statesman, who had been so true to benevolent ideas, he came forward to meet him, saying, with his whole soul, “Let me kiss the hand which signed the salvation of the people.”  The scene with Franklin was more touching still.  Voltaire began in English, which he had spoken early in life, but, having lost the habit, he soon charted to French, saying that he “could not resist the desire of speaking for one moment the language of Franklin.”  The latter had brought with him his grandson, for whom he asked a benediction.  “God and Liberty,” said Voltaire, putting his hands upon the head of the child; “this is the only benediction proper for the grandson of Franklin.”  A few days afterward, at a public session of the Academy, they were placed side by side, when, amidst the applause of the enlightened company, the two old men rose and embraced.  The political triumphs of Franklin and the dramatic triumphs of Voltaire caused the exclamation, that “Solon embraced Sophocles.”  But it was more than this.  It was France embracing America, beneath the benediction of “God and Liberty.”  Only a few days later, Voltaire died.  But the alliance with France had received a new assurance, and the cause of American Independence an unalterable impulse.