John Adams, who witnessed the spectacle, thus describes what followed:
"The two aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and
frivolity, embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms, and
kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry
immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose over all
Europe, 'How charming it was to see Solon and Sophocles embrace.'"

A month later Voltaire lay dead, his brilliant eyes closed, his active
brain at rest. The excitement of his visit to Paris and the constant
ovation which he had received had been too much for the old man. He had
died in the midst of his triumph, vanished from the stage of life just
when his genius had compelled the highest display of appreciation which
it was possible for his countrymen to give. As for the church, which his
keen pen had dealt with as severely as with the temporal powers, it
could not well forget his incessant and bitter attacks. That he might
obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the
Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the
proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and
scoffer at all tradition and all conventionality.

Voltaire was deistic in belief, in no sense atheistic. Among his latest
words were, "I die worshipping God, loving my friends, not hating my
enemies, but detesting superstition." Despite the admiration of the
people, the powers of the state could not forget that the man so
enthusiastically received was the great apostle of mockery and
irreverence. The government gave its last kick to the dead lion by
ordering the papers not to comment on his death. The church laid an
interdict on his burial in consecrated ground,--an hour or two too late,
as it proved. His body, minus the heart, was transferred in 1791 to the
Pantheon, and when, in 1864, the sarcophagus was opened with the purpose
of restoring the heart to the other remains, it was found to be empty.
In the stirring days of France the body had by some one, in some way,
been removed.

_THE DIAMOND NECKLACE._

Paris, that city of sensations, was shaken to its centre by tidings of a
new and startling event. The Cardinal de Rohan, grand almoner of France,
at mass-time, and when dressed in his pontifical robes, had been
suddenly arrested in the palace of Versailles and taken to the Bastille.
Why? No one knew; though many had their opinions