Af ter Madame du Chatelet's death Voltaire had some idea of settling in Paris, but mischief was the very breath of his nostrils. He went on writing satiric tales like Zadig. He en gaged in a foolish and undignified struggle with Crebillon pere (not fits), a rival set up against him by Madame de Pompadour, but a dramatist who, in part of one play, Rhadamiste et Zenobie, has struck a note of tragedy in the grand Cornelian strain, which Voltaire could never hope to echo. Semirame (1748), Oreste (175o) and Rome sauvee itself were all products of this rivalry. All this time Frederick of Prussia had been continuing his invitations. Voltaire left Paris on June 15, 1751, and reached Berlin on July ro. It is certain that at first the king behaved altogether like a king to his guest. He pressed him to remain; he gave him (the words are Voltaire's own) one of his orders, twenty thousand francs a year, and four thousand additional for his niece, Madame Denis, in case she would come and keep house for her uncle. His residence in Prussia lasted nearly three years. It was quite impossible that Voltaire and Frederick should get on together for long. Voltaire was not humble enough to be a mere butt, as many of Frederick's led poets were; he was not enough of a gentleman to hold his own place with dignity and discretion; he was constantly jealous both of his equals in age and reputation, such as Maupertuis, and of his juniors and in feriors, sucl'i as Baculard D'Arnaud. He was greedy, restless, and in a way Bohemian. He tried to get D'Arnaud exiled, and succeeded. He got into a quite unnecessary quarrel with Lessing. He had not been in the country six months before he engaged in a discreditable piece of financial gambling with Hirsch, the Dres den Jew. He was accused of something like downright forgery— that is to say, of altering a paper signed by Hirsch after he had signed it. The king's disgust at this affair (which came to an open scandal before the tribunals) was so great that he was on the point of ordering Voltaire out of Prussia, and Darget the secretary had no small trouble in arranging the matter (February 175r). Then it was Voltaire's turn to be disgusted with an occupation he had undertaken himself—the occupation of "buckwashing" the king's French verses. However, he succeeded in finishing and printing the Siecle de Louis XIV., while the Dictionnaire philosophique is said to have been devised and begun at Potsdam.
But Voltaire's restless temper was brewing up for another storm. In the early autumn of 1751 La Mettrie, one of the king's para sites, and a man of much more talent than is generally allowed, horrified Voltaire by telling him that Frederick had in conversa tion applied to him (Voltaire) a proverb about "sucking the orange and flinging away its skin," and about the same time the dispute with Maupertuis, which had more than anything else to do with his exclusion from Prussia, came to a head. Maupertuis got into a dispute with one Konig. The king took his president's part ; Voltaire took Konig's. But Maupertuis must needs write his Letters, and thereupon (1752) appeared one of Voltaire's most famous, though perhaps not one of his most read works, the Diatribe du Docteur Akakia. Even Voltaire did not venture to publish this lampoon on a great official of a prince so touchy as the king of Prussia without some permission, and if all tales are true he obtained this by another piece of something like forgery—getting the king to endorse a totally different pamphlet on its last leaf, and affixing that last leaf to Akakia. Of this Frederick was not aware; but he did get some wind of the Diatribe itself, sent for the author, heard it read to his own great amusement, and either actually burned the ms. or believed
that it was burnt. In a few days printed copies appeared. Fred erick put Voltaire under arrest for a time. After repeated recon ciliations followed by fresh difficulties Voltaire at last left Pots dam on the 26th of March, 1753. It was nearly three months afterwards that the famous, ludicrous and brutal arrest was made at Frankfort, on the persons of himself and his niece, who had met him meanwhile. The whole situation was at last put an end to by the city authorities, who probably felt that they were not playing a very creditable part. Voltaire left Frankfort on July 7, and travelled to Colmar.
Voltaire's second stage was now over in his sixtieth year. He had been, in the first blush of his Frankfort disaster, refused, or at least not granted, permission even to enter France proper. At Colmar he was not safe, especially when in January 1754 a pirated edition of the Essai sur les moeurs, written long before, appeared. Permission to establish himself in France was now absolutely refused. Nor did an extremely offensive performance of Vol taire's—the solemn partaking of the Eucharist at Colmar after due confession—at all mollify his enemies. His exclusion from France, however, really meant exclusion from Paris and its neigh bourhood. In the summer he went to Plombieres, and after returning to Colmar for some time journeyed in the beginning of winter to Lyons, and thence in the middle of December to Geneva. Voltaire had no purpose of remaining in the city, and almost immediately bought a country house just outside the gates, to which he gave the name Les Deices. He was here practically at the meeting-point of four distinct jurisdictions— Geneva, the canton Vaud, Sardinia and France, while other can tons were within easy reach; and he bought other houses dotted about these territories, so as never to be without a refuge close at hand in case of sudden storms. At Les Delices he set up a considerable establishment, which his great wealth made him able easily to afford. He kept open house for visitors; he had printers close at hand in Geneva; he fitted up a private theatre in which he could enjoy what was perhaps the greatest pleasure of his whole life—acting in a play of his own, stage-managed by himself. His residence at Geneva brought him into correspond ence (at first quite amicable) with the most famous of her citizens, J. J. Rousseau. His Orphelin de la Chine, performed at Paris in 1755, was very well received; the notorious La Pucelle appeared in the same year. The earthquake at Lisbon, which appalled other people, gave Voltaire an excellent opportunity for ridiculing the beliefs of the orthodox, first in verse (1756) and later in the (from a literary point of view) unsurpassable tale of Candide (1759). All was, however, not yet quite smooth with him. Geneva had a law expressly forbidding theatrical perform ances in any circumstances whatever. Voltaire had infringed this law already as far as private performances went, and he had thought of building a regular theatre, not indeed at Geneva but at Lausanne. He undoubtedly instigated D'Alembert to include a censure of the prohibition in his Encyclopedie article on "Geneva," a proceeding which provoked Rousseau's celebrated Lettre a D'Alembert sur les spectacles. As for himself, he looked about for a place where he could combine the social liberty of France with the political liberty of Geneva, and he found one.