“Where does he make that ridiculous remark?”

“In his academical discourses.”

“I have not read them, but I will get them.”

He took a pen and noted the name down, and said,—­

“But Tassoni has criticised Petrarch very ingeniously.”

“Yes, but he has dishonoured taste and literature, like Muratori.”

“Here he is.  You must allow that his learning is immense.”

“Est ubi peccat.”

Voltaire opened a door, and I saw a hundred great files full of papers.

“That’s my correspondence,” said he.  “You see before you nearly fifty thousand letters, to which I have replied.”

“Have you a copy of your answers?”

“Of a good many of them.  That’s the business of a servant of mine, who has nothing else to do.”

“I know plenty of booksellers who would give a good deal to get hold of your answers.

“Yes; but look out for the booksellers when you publish anything, if you have not yet begun; they are greater robbers than Barabbas.”

“I shall not have anything to do with these gentlemen till I am an old man.”

“Then they will be the scourge of your old age.”

Thereupon I quoted a Macaronic verse by Merlin Coccaeus.

“Where’s that from?”

“It’s a line from a celebrated poem in twenty-four cantos.”

“Celebrated?”

“Yes; and, what is more, worthy of being celebrated; but to appreciate it one must understand the Mantuan dialect.”

“I could make it out, if you could get me a copy.”

“I shall have the honour of presenting you with one to-morrow.”

“You will oblige me extremely.”

We had to leave his room and spend two hours in the company, talking over all sorts of things.  Voltaire displayed all the resources of his brilliant and fertile wit, and charmed everyone in spite of his sarcastic observations which did not even spare those present, but he had an inimitable manner of lancing a sarcasm without wounding a person’s feelings.  When the great man accompanied his witticisms with a graceful smile he could always get a laugh.

He kept up a notable establishment and an excellent table, a rare circumstance with his poetic brothers, who are rarely favourites of Plutus as he was.  He was then sixty years old, and had a hundred and twenty thousand francs a year.  It has been said maliciously that this great man enriched himself by cheating his publishers; whereas the fact was that he fared no better than any other author, and instead of duping them was often their dupe.  The Cramers must be excepted, whose fortune he made.  Voltaire had other ways of making money than by his pen; and as he was greedy of fame, he often gave his works away on the sole condition that they were to be printed and published.  During the short time I was with him, I was a witness of such a generous action; he made a present to his bookseller of the “Princess of Babylon,” a charming story which he had written in three days.