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to be ‘stolen’? The whole affair was apt to become so involved that even his close friends could make neither head nor tail of it. When the work had been read by everybody that mattered and made its full effect, the police would step in. According to how tendentious it was supposed to be, it would be confiscated, or burnt by the public hangman; the publisher warned to be more careful, fined, or sent to prison; and a lettre de cachet issued against the anonymous author. Voltaire would become more and more agitated, and tell more and more lies. ‘As soon as there is the slightest danger,’he wrote, on one of these occasions, to d’Alembert, ‘I beg you to warn me, so that with my habitual candour and innocence I can disavow the work’; and again: ‘It is not the exile that I mind, but that such infamous verses should be attributed to me.’ He would fly for shelter to the country house of some Prince or Duke so powerful that the police were unlikely to make an arrest there without due warning. After a while, largely owing to the efforts of Voltaire’s friends at Court (Richelieu, the d’Argenson brothers, or, later on, Mme de Pompadour, prodded into action by the faithful d’Argental) the affair would blow over; he would creep back to Paris and presently settle down to write his next attack on authority.
    It was two years after the exile to Saint-Ange before Voltaire was in trouble again. The reign of the Regent, the Duc d’Orléans, had begun, scandalous from a moral point of view, a reaction from the old King’s sternly religious rule. Verses and libels about the Regent’s private life circulated in the capital and some of these were attributed to Voltaire. They went too far, with references to Lot, insinuating that d’Orléans was having an affair with his daughter, as indeed he was. Voltaire strenuously denied having written them, at the time and ever after, but nobody believed him. He was formally exiled from Paris by the Regent, who ordered him to go and live at distant Tulle. Voltaire pulled strings and got himself sent to Sully, on the Loire, instead. It was understood that he had relations there whose example would correct his impudence and temper his vivacity. We hear no more of these excellent folk, for as soon as Voltaire arrived at Sully, he moved into the château. The Duc de Sully was then forty-seven, a brave soldier but an unprincipled man. Member of a set known in Paris as les libertins du Temple, which had taken up Voltaire when he was hardly more than a child, the Duke loved the company of intellectuals. President Hénault said there was an odour about him, of having lived with clever men, like the odour which clings to a bottle that has contained scent. Voltaire, who loved the company of Dukes, was perfectly happy at Sully where there were continual balls and fêtes, hunting-parties and every sort of amusement. He said it was only fair that he should be allotted such an agreeable exile since he was innocentof the crime for which he was being punished. Before long the good-natured Regent allowed him to go back to Paris; he immediately began to cook up more mischief. He bore a grudge for the very mild correction he had received and soon the police were reporting that young Arouet could not speak of the Duc d’Orléans without transports of rage, and that he was given to reciting virulent rhymes about him all over Paris.
    Everything that appeared in print against the government began to be laid at Voltaire’s door. There was a satire entitled ‘ J’ai vu’. ‘ I have seen the State prisons crammed to bursting point. I have seen poor soldiers dying of hunger. I have seen the whole population crushed by taxes. I have seen the Jesuit worshipped as if he were God’ – etc. This was immediately attributed to him, and, for once, wrongly attributed. The real culprit, a certain Le Brun, confessed years later to