Voltaire, in a quieter element. But the element was not quiet,--far from
it; nor was Voltaire easily sufficeable!

PERPETUAL PRESIDENT MAUPERTUIS HAS A VISIT FROM ONE KONIG, OUT OF
HOLLAND, CONCERNING THE INFINITELY LITTLE.

Whether Maupertuis, in red wig with yellow bottom, saw these high
gauderies of the Carrousel, the Plays in Princess Amelia's Antechamber,
and the rest of it, I do not know: but if so, he was not in the top
place; nor did anybody take notice of him, as everybody did of Voltaire.
Meanwhile, I have something to quote, as abridged and distilled from
various sources, chiefly from Formey; which will be of much concernment
farther on.

Some four weeks after those Carrousel effulgencies, Perpetual President
Maupertuis had a visit (September 21st, just while the Sun was crossing
the Line; thanks to Formey for the date, who keeps a Note-book,
useful in these intricacies): visit from Professor Konig, an effective
mathematical man from the Dutch parts. Whom readers have forgotten
again; though they saw him once: in violent quarrel, about the
Infinitely Little, with Madame du Chatelet, Voltaire witnessing with
pain;--it was just as they quitted Cirey together, ten years ago, for
these new courses of adventure. Do readers recall the circumstance?
Maupertuis, referee in that quarrel, had, with a bluntness offensive to
the female mind, declared Konig indisputably in the right; and there had
followed a dryness between the divine Emilie and the Flattener of the
Earth, scarcely to be healed by Voltaire's best efforts.

Konig has gone his road since then; become a fine solid fellow;
Professor in a Dutch University; more latterly Librarian to the Dutch
Stadtholder: still frank of speech, and with a rugged free-and-easy
turn, but of manful manners; really a person of various culture, and as
is still noticeable, of a solid geometric turn of mind. Having now, as
Librarian at the Hague, more leisure and more money, he has made a run
to Berlin,--chiefly or entirely to see his Maupertuis again, whom he
still remembers gratefully as his first Patron in older times, and a man
of sound parts, though rather blusterous now and then, A little bit of
scientific business also he has with him. Konig is Member of the Berlin
Academy, for some years back; and there is a thing he would speak with
the Perpetual President upon. "Wants nothing else in Berlin," says
Formey: a hearing by the road that Maupertuis was not there, he had