n a quarter of a century he had been exiled from the
land he loved, because he dared to exercise the privilege of free speech
in that land of oppression, and to deal with kings and nobles as man
with man, not as reverent worshipper with divinity. Now, in his
eighty-fourth year of age, he had ventured to come back to the city he
loved above all others, with scarcely enough life left for the journey,
and far from sure that power would not still seek to suppress genius as
it had done in the past.

If he had such fears, there was no warrant for them. Paris was ready to
worship him. The king himself would not have dared to interfere with the
popular idol in that interval of enthusiastic ebullition. All Paris was
prepared to cast itself at his feet; all France was eager to do him
honor; all calumny, jealousy, hatred were forgotten; a nation had risen
to welcome and honor its greatest genius, and the splendors of the court
paled before the glory which seemed to emanate from that feeble,
tottering veteran of the empire of thought, who had come back to occupy,
for a brief period, the throne of his old dominion.

The admiration, the enthusiasm, the glory were too much for him. He was
dying in the excitement of joy and triumph. Yet, with his wonderful
elasticity of frame and mind, he rose again for a fuller enjoyment of
that popular ovation which was to him the wine of life. The story of his
final triumph has been so graphically told by an eye-witness that we
cannot do better than to quote his words.

"M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the Academy and at
the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches, to the Academy
besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him pass, and
then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated plaudits and
acclamations. The Academy came out into the first room to meet him, an
honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even to the
foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.

"The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that
which awaited him at the National theatre. As soon as his carriage was
seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of joy. All the
curb-stones, all the barriers, all the windows, were crammed with
spectators, and scarcely was the carriage stopped when people were
already on the imperial and even on the wheels to get a nearer view of
the divinity. Scarcely had he entered the house w