Friedrich or anybody! That
D'Arnaud had done this and done that, of an Anti-Voltairian, treasonous
nature;--and that, in short, life was impossible in the neighborhood of
such a D'Arnaud!"D'Arnaud has corrupted my Clerk (Prince Henri hungering
in vain for LA PUCELLE, has got sight of it, in this way); [Clerk was
dismissed accordingly (one Tinois, an ingenious creature),--and COLLINI
appointed in his stead.] D'Arnaud has been gossiping to Freron and the
Paris Newspapers; D'Arnaud has" [Voltaire to Friedrich (--OEuvres de
Frederic,--xxii. 257), undated, "November, 1750."]--Has, in effect,
been a flaunting young fool; of dissolute, esurient, slightly profligate
turn; occasionally helping in the Theatricals, and much studious to make
himself notable, and useful to the Princely kind. A D'Arnaud of nearly
no significance, to Friedrich or to anybody. A D'Arnaud whose bits of
fooleries and struttings about, in the peacock or jackdaw way, might
surely have been below the notice of a Trismegistus!

Friedrich, painfully made sensible what a skinless explosive
Trismegistus he has got on hand, answers, I suppose, in words little or
nothing,--in Letters, I observe, answers absolutely nothing, to Voltaire
repeating and re-repeating;--does simply dismiss D'Arnaud (a "BON
DIABLE," as Voltaire, to impartial people, calls him), or accept
D'Arnaud's demission, and cut the poor fool adrift. Who sallies out into
infinite space, to Paris latterly ("alive there in 1805"); and claims
henceforth perpetual oblivion from us and mankind. And now there will be
peace in our garden of the gods, and perpetual azure will return?

Alas, D'Arnaud is not well gone, when there has begun brewing in
threefold secrecy a mass of galvanic matter, which, in few weeks more,
filled the Heavens with miraculous foul gases and the blackness of
darkness;--which, in short, exploded about New-year's time, as the
world-famous VOLTAIRE-HIRSCH LAWSUIT, still remembered, though only as a
portent and mystery, by observant on-lookers. Of which it is now our sad
duty to say something; though nowhere, in the Annals of Jurisprudence,
is there a more despicable thing, or a deeper involved in lies and
deliriums by current reporters of it, about which the sane mind can be
called upon accidentally to speak a word. Beaten, riddled, shovelled,
washed in many waters, by a patient though disgusted Predecessor in
this field, there lies by me a copious but wearisome Narrative of this
mat