After having enjoyed a calm and refreshing sleep ten hours, I felt myself able to enjoy the delightful society of M. de Voltaire.  I went to his house, but I was disappointed in my hopes, as it pleased the great man to be in a fault-finding and sarcastic mood the whole day.  He knew I had to leave on the morrow.

He began by thanking me at table for my present of Merlin Coccaeus.

“You certainly gave it me with good intentions,” said he, “but I owe you no thanks for praising it so highly, as you made me lose four hours in reading nonsense.”

I felt my hair stand on end, but I mastered my emotions, and told him quietly enough that one day, perhaps, he would find himself obliged to praise the poem more highly than I had done.  I quoted several instances of the insufficiency of a first perusal.

“That’s true,” said he; “but as for your Merlin, I will read him no more.  I have put him beside Chapelain’s ’Pucelle’.”

“Which pleases all the critics, in spite of its bad versification, for it is a good poem, and Chapelain was a real poet though he wrote bad verses.  I cannot overlook his genius.”

My freedom must have shocked him, and I might have guessed it when he told me he had put the ‘Macaronicon’ beside the ‘Pucelle’.  I knew that there was a poem of the same title in circulation, which passed for Voltaire’s; but I also knew that he disavowed it, and I thought that would make him conceal the vexation my explanation must have caused him.  It was not so, however; he contradicted me sharply, and I closed with him.

“Chapelain,” said I, “has the merit of having rendered his subject-matter pleasant, without pandering to the tastes of his readers by saying things shocking to modesty and piety.  So thinks my master Crebillon:” 

“Crebillon!  You cite a weighty authority.  But how is my friend Crebillon your master, may I ask?”

“He taught me to speak French in less than two years, and as a mark of my gratitude I translated his Radamiste into Italian Alexandrines.  I am the first Italian who has dared to use this metre in our language.”

“The first?  I beg your pardon, as that honour belongs to my friend Pierre Jacques Martelli.”

“I am sorry to be obliged to tell you that you are making a mistake.”

“Why, I have his works, printed at Bologna, in my room!”

“I don’t deny that, I am only talking about the metre used by Martelli.  What you are thinking of must be verses of fourteen syllables; without alternative masculine and feminine rhymes.  However, I confess that he thinks he has imitated the French Alexandrines, and his preface made me explode with laughter.  Did you read it?”

“Read it?  I always read prefaces, and Martelli proves there that his verses have the same effect in Italian as our Alexandrine verses have in French.”