in his will did
not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
other things--I was a fool, and he knew it."

Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
needs.

A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man
down.

Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds--those who are
innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.

Voltaire had been a favorite of various women--usually married ladies,
and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
least a homely one--for only such are grateful."

In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."

Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
isn't busy with the plain women--that is why I like you," he once said
to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
voice by the right person.

The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
su