letter, and added that if the dangerous and cruel man really persisted in his threat he would be received with a vigorous discharge from those instruments of intimate utility which figure so freely in the comedies of Moliere.  This stroke was the coup de grace of Maupertuis.  Shattered in body and mind, he dragged himself from Berlin to die at last in Basle under the ministration of a couple of Capuchins and a Protestant valet reading aloud the Genevan Bible.  In the meantime Frederick had decided on a violent measure.  He had suddenly remembered that Voltaire had carried off with him one of the very few privately printed copies of those poetical works upon which he had spent so much devoted labour; it occurred to him that they contained several passages of a highly damaging kind; and he could feel no certainty that those passages would not be given to the world by the malicious Frenchman.  Such, at any rate, were his own excuses for the step which he now took; but it seems possible that he was at least partly swayed by feelings of resentment and revenge which had been rendered uncontrollable by the last onslaught upon Maupertuis.  Whatever may have been his motives, it is certain that he ordered the Prussian Resident in Frankfort, which was Voltaire’s next stopping-place, to hold the poet in arrest until he delivered over the royal volume.  A multitude of strange blunders and ludicrous incidents followed, upon which much controversial and patriotic ink has been spilt by a succession of French and German biographers.  To an English reader it is clear that in this little comedy of errors none of the parties concerned can escape from blame—­that Voltaire was hysterical, undignified, and untruthful, that the Prussian Resident was stupid and domineering, that Frederick was careless in his orders and cynical as to their results.  Nor, it is to be hoped, need any Englishman be reminded that the consequences of a system of government in which the arbitrary will of an individual takes the place of the rule of law are apt to be disgraceful and absurd.

After five weeks’ detention at Frankfort, Voltaire was free—­free in every sense of the word—­free from the service of Kings and the clutches of Residents, free in his own mind, free to shape his own destiny.  He hesitated for several months, and then settled down by the Lake of Geneva.  There the fires, which had lain smouldering so long in the profundities of his spirit, flared up, and flamed over Europe, towering and inextinguishable.  In a few years letters began to flow once more to and from Berlin.  At first the old grievances still rankled; but in time even the wrongs of Maupertuis and the misadventures of Frankfort were almost forgotten.  Twenty years passed, and the King of Prussia was submitting his verses as anxiously as ever to Voltaire, whose compliments and cajoleries were pouring out in their accustomed stream.  But their relationship was no longer that of master and pupil, courtier and King; it was that of two independent and equal powers.  Even Frederick the Great was forced to see at last in the Patriarch of Ferney something more than a monkey with a genius for French versification.  He actually came to respect the author of Akakia, and to cherish his memory.  ‘Je lui fais tous les matins ma priere,’ he told d’Alembert, when Voltaire had been two years in the grave; ’je lui dis, Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis.’