speech. The two men could no more meet
without striking fire than flint and steel. Moreover, Voltaire was
normally satirical, restless, inclined to vanity and jealousy, and that
terrible pen of his could never be brought to respect persons and
places. With a martinet like Frederick, the visit was sure to end in a
quarrel, despite the admiration of the prince for the poet.

Frederick, though a German king, was French in his love for the Gallic
literature, philosophy, and language. He cared little for German
literature--there was little of it in his day worth caring for--and
always wrote and spoke in French, while French wits and thinkers who
could not live in safety in straitlaced Paris, gained the amplest scope
for their views in his court. Voltaire found three such emigrants
there, Maupertuis, La Mettrie, and D'Arnaud. He was received by them
with enthusiasm, as the sovereign of their little court of free thought.
Frederick had given him a pension and the post of chamberlain,--an
office with very light duties,--and the expatriated poet set himself out
to enjoy his new life with zest and animation.

"A hundred and fifty thousand victorious soldiers," he wrote to Paris,
"no attorneys, opera, plays, philosophy, poetry, a hero who is a
philosopher and a poet, grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses,
trumpets and violins, Plato's symposium, society and freedom! Who would
believe it? It is all true, however."

"It is Caesar, it is Marcus Aurelius, it is Julian, it is sometimes Abbe
Chaulieu, with whom I sup," he further wrote; "there is the charm of
retirement, there is the freedom of the country, with all those little
delights which the lord of a castle who is a king can procure for his
very obedient humble servants and guests. My own duties are to do
nothing. I enjoy my leisure. I give an hour a day to the King of Prussia
to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I am his grammarian, not
his chamberlain ... Never in any place in the world was there more
freedom of speech touching the superstitions of men, and never were they
treated with more banter and contempt. God is respected, but all they
who have cajoled men in His name are treated unsparingly."

It was, in short, an Eden for a free-thinker; but an Eden with its
serpent, and this serpent was the envy, jealousy, and unrestrainable
satiric spirit of Voltaire. There was soon trouble between him and his
fellow-exiles. He managed to get Arnaud exiled from the c