e is rather a
king in the Halles."[33] This must have been a new word in the ears of
the old man, who had grown up in the habit of thinking of public opinion
as the opinion, not of markets where the common people bought and sold,
but of the galleries of Versailles. Except for its theology, the age of
Louis XIV always remained the great age to Voltaire, the age of pomp and
literary glory, and it was too difficult a feat to cling on one side to
the Grand Monarch, and to stretch out a hand on the other to the _Social
Contract_. It was too difficult for the man who had been embraced by
Ninon de l'Enclos, who was the correspondent of the greatest sovereigns
in Europe, and the intimate of some of the greatest nobles in France, to
feel much sympathy with writings that made their author king of the
Halles. Frederick offered Rousseau shelter, and so did Voltaire; but
each of them disliked his work as warmly as the other. They did not
understand one who, if he wrote with an eloquence that touched all
hearts, repulsed friends and provoked enemies like a madman or a savage.
The very language of Rousseau was to Voltaire as an unknown tongue, for
it was the language of reason clothing the births of passionate
sensation. _Emile_ only wearied him, though there were perhaps fifty
pages of it which he would have had bound in morocco.[34] It is a stale
romance, he cries, while the _Social Contract_ is only remarkable for
some insults rudely thrown at kings by a citizen of Geneva, and for four
insipid pages against the Christian religion, which are simply
plagiarized from Bayle's centos.[35] Partly, no doubt, this extreme
irritation was due to the insults with which Jean Jacques had repulsed
his offers of shelter and assistance, had repudiated Voltaire's attempts
to defend him, and had held up Voltaire himself as a proper object for
the persecutions of Geneva. But there was a still deeper root of
discrepancy, which we have already pointed out. Rousseau's exaggerated
tone was an offence to Voltaire's more just and reasonable spirit; and
the feigned austerity of a man whose life and manners he knew assumed in
his eyes a disagreeable shade of hypocrisy.[36] Besides these things, he
was clearly apprehensive of the storms which Rousseau's extraordinary
hardihood had the very natural effect of raising in the circles of
authority, though it is true that the most acute observers of the time
thought that they noticed a very perceptible increase of Vo