“No, I read about the lake in one of Anatole France’s weekly essays in ‘Le Temps,’ but there was no reference to Johnson, of course.
“Speaking of Voltaire—I don’t remember that he mentioned Johnson in his English Letters, though he did take the trouble (in Eighteenth Century French ignorance) to call Shakespeare ‘a drunken savage,’ ‘an amazing genius’ and ‘an indecent buffoon who had rendered English taste a ruined lady for two hundred years to come.’”
“Date’s quite correct, as I once pointed out to poor Gene Field,” interrupted Stoker. He called for a slate—they had no paper at the Cheese—and scrawled:
| Opening of the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving and Bram Stoker | 1878 |
| Death of Shakespeare | 1616 |
| —— | |
| Interval | 262 |
“As you see,” added Bram, “Voltaire was out only a little more than half a century. And what’s half a century when the Oxford Dodo—if the moths hadn’t eaten him—would now be seven and twenty trillions years old? But go on with your Voltaire, Mark.”
“You mean Johnson,” said Mark; “how he would have cackled had he known that Voltaire got his start in literature by the library he bought as a youngster out of Ninon de l’Enclos’ two thousand livres bequest. ‘Authorship reared on a wench’s patrimony,’ I hear him expectorate, and George Rex would have been tickled to death, for Johnson, he would have argued, has now extracted the sting from the Frenchman’s description of Kings, as ‘a pack of rogues and highwaymen.’”
As he was speaking Mark grabbed hold of his elbow, indulging in a grimace of pain. “What’s the date?” he demanded abruptly.
“August 25th.”
“Late, as usual,” said Mark with mock mournfulness. “True friends of mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for good measure.”
“What happened on May 14th?”