should be allowed, and every religion out of
accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
religion but the code itself.

Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant
to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is
reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way
that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of
the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to
him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau
more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his
eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says
something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment,
that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental
merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever