[32] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his reception of the confessor. [↑]
[33] “Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés, est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les mœurs de nos évêques.” Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762. [↑]
[34] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900, p. 68. [↑]
[35] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314. [↑]
[36] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists on the decorum of the talk, even at d’Holbach’s table. [↑]
[37] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes. [↑]
[38] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315. [↑]
[39] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the real name Arouet, with “le jeune” (junior) added, thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune). [↑]
[40] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire’s bitter enemy—on the score, it is said, of the young man’s epigram on the elder poet’s “Ode to Posterity,” which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the irreligion of Voltaire. [↑]
[41] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet’s Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it “one of the first attacks on which philosophy in France had ventured against superstition” (Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19). [↑]