“Exactly, that’s what’s so amusing.  The worthy man is quite mistaken, and I only ask you to listen to what I have to say on the subject.  Your masculine verse has only twelve poetic syllables, and the feminine thirteen.  All Martelli’s lines have fourteen syllables, except those that finish with a long vowel, which at the end of a line always counts as two syllables.  You will observe that the first hemistitch in Martelli always consists of seven syllables, while in French it only has six.  Your friend Pierre Jacques was either stone deaf or very hard of hearing.”

“Then you have followed our theory of versification rigorously.”

“Just so, in spite of the difficulty, as nearly all our words end with a short syllable.”

“What reception has been accorded to your innovation?”

“It has not been found pleasing, because nobody knows how to recite my verses; but I hope to triumph when I deliver them myself before our literary clubs.”

“Do you remember any of your version of the Radamiste?”

“I remember it all.”

“You have a wonderful memory; I should be glad to hear it.”

I began to recite the same scene that I had recited to Crebillon ten years before, and I thought M. de Voltaire listened with pleasure.

“It doesn’t strike one as at all harsh,” said he.

This was the highest praise he would give me.  In his turn the great man recited a passage from Tancred which had not as yet been published, and which was afterwards considered, and rightly, as a masterpiece.

We should have got on very well if we had kept to that, but on my quoting a line of Horace to praise one of his pieces, he said that Horace was a great master who had given precepts which would never be out of date.  Thereupon I answered that he himself had violated one of them, but that he had violated it grandly.

“Which is that?”

“You do not write, ’Contentus paucis lectoribus’.”

“If Horace had had to combat the hydra-headed monster of superstition, he would have written as I have written—­for all the world.”

“It seems to me that you might spare yourself the trouble of combating what you will never destroy.”

“That which I cannot finish others will, and I shall always have the glory of being the first in the field.”

“Very good; but supposing you succeed in destroying superstition, what are you going to put in its place?”

“I like that.  If I deliver the race of man from a wild beast which is devouring it, am I to be asked what I intend to put in its place?”

“It does not devour it; on the contrary, it is necessary to its existence.”

“Necessary to its existence!  That is a horrible blasphemy, the falsity of which will be seen in the future.  I love the human race; I would fain see men like myself, free and happy, and superstition and freedom cannot go together.  Where do you find an enslaved and yet a happy people?”