days of the Terror. It dispels
some false impressions of Voltaire's supposed intolerance of criticism,
to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. He
showed himself worthy of such courageous conduct. 'One sees things ill,'
he writes, 'when one sees them from too far off. After all, we ought
never to blush to go to school if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeat
my acknowledgments to you.'[5] Condorcet did not conceive that either to
be blind to a man's errors or to compromise them is to prove yourself
his friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns,
and he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his
intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of
direct personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it is
about another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the writer
himself.

Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his correspondence with
Turgot. What Turgot loved in Condorcet was his 'simplicity of
character.'[6] Turgot was almost as much less vivacious than Condorcet,
as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quite
distinct types of character, but this may be a condition of the most
perfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is most
conscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, and
sure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow by
being watchfully held under the control of reason; whose ideas are no
less vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and ordered
train; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses or
crimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besetting
infirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this.
Whatever he wished he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of the
epoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe something
theological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters the
distant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and at
every mention of false opinion or evil-doing a sombre and angry shadow
seems to fall upon the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine of
the infinite perfectibility of human nature, and the correspondingly
infinite augmentation of human happiness; but Condorcet's
ever-smouldering impetuosity would be content with nothing less than the
arrival of at least a considerable instalment of