just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
reasons--that is the way learned women write--they write like professors
of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
russe--not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.

Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
lightened up so the public executioner would deign to notice it?

M. de Voltaire responded by reading to her a little thing of his own.

The next day she called again.

Some say that Madame called on Voltaire to secure a loan on her
husband's estate at Civey. No matter--she got the loan.

Doubtless she did not know where she was going--none of us do. We are
all sailing under sealed orders.

The Madame had been married eight years. She was versed in Latin and
knew Italian literature. She was educated; Voltaire was not. She offered
to teach him Italian if he would give her lessons in English.

They read to each other things they had recently written. When men and
women read to each other and mingle their emotions, the danger-line is
being reached. Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love
each other. All they desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a
receptive listener.

Thus are the literary germs vitalized--by giving our thoughts to another
we really make them our own. Only well-sexed people produce
literature--poetry is the pollen of the mind. Meter, rhythm, lilt and
style are stamen, pistil and stalk swaying in the warm breeze of
springtime.

An order for arrest was out for Voltaire. Pamphlets which he had been
refused permission to publish in Paris were printed at Rouen and were
setting all Paris by the ears.

With Madame du Chatelet he fled to Civey, where was the tumbledown
chateau of the Marquis--the Madame's complaisant husband. Voltaire
advanced the Marquis sixteen hundred pounds to put the place in order,
and then on his own account fitted up two sumptuous apartments, one for
himself and one for Madame. The Marquis went away with his regiment, and
occasionally came back and lounged about the chateau. But Voltaire was
the real master of the place.

Voltaire was neither domestic nor rural in his tastes, but the Du
Chatelet seemed to fill his cup to the brim, and made him enjoy what
otherwise would have been exile. He wrote incessant