hen Sieur Brizard came
up with a crown of laurels, which Madame de Villette placed upon the
great man's head, but which he immediately took off, though the public
urged him to keep it on by clapping of hands and by cheers which
resounded from all parts of the house with such a din as never was
heard.

"All the women stood up. I saw at one time that part of the pit which
was under the boxes go down on their knees, in despair of getting a
sight any other way. The whole house was darkened with the dust raised
by the ebb and flow of the excited multitude. It was not without
difficulty that the players managed at last to begin the piece. It was
'Irene,' which was given for the sixth time. Never had this tragedy been
better played, never less listened to, never more applauded. The
illustrious old man rose to thank the public, and, a moment afterwards,
there appeared on a pedestal in the middle of the stage a bust of this
great man, and the actresses, garlands and crowns in hand, covered it
with laurels.

"M. de Voltaire seemed to be sinking beneath the burden of age and of
the homage with which he had just been overwhelmed. He appeared deeply
affected, his eyes still sparkled amidst the pallor of his face, but it
seemed as if he breathed no longer save with the consciousness of his
glory. The people shouted, 'Lights! lights! that everybody may see him!'
The coachman was entreated to go at a walk, and thus he was accompanied
by cheering and the crowd as far as Pont Royal."

This was a very different greeting from that which Voltaire had received
fifty years before, when a nobleman with whom he had quarrelled had him
beaten with sticks in the public street, and, when Voltaire showed an
intention of making him answer at the sword's point for this outrage,
had him seized and thrown into the Bastille by the authorities. This was
but one of the several times he had been immured in this gloomy prison
for daring to say what he thought about powers and potentates. But time
brings its revenges. The Chevalier de Rohan, who had had the poet
castigated, was forgotten except as the man who had dishonored himself
in seeking to dishonor Voltaire, and the poet had become the idol of the
people of Paris, high and low alike.

Voltaire was not the only great man in Paris at this period. There was
another as great as he, but great in a very different fashion,--Benjamin
Franklin, the American philosopher and statesman, as famous for common
se