The poet had talked, after his usual manner, of being old and worn out, and tottering on the brink of the grave. ‘Why, you are only sixty-two,’ said Frederick, ‘and your soul is full of that fire which animates and sustains the body. You will bury me and half the present generation. You will have the delight of making a spiteful couplet on my tomb.’[161] Voltaire did not make a couplet, but he wrote a prose lampoon on the king’s private life, which is one of the bitterest libels that malice ever prompted, and from which the greater part of Europe has been content to borrow its idea of the character of Frederick.[162] This was vengeance enough even for Voltaire. We may add that while Voltaire constantly declared that he could never forget the outrages which the king of Prussia had inflicted on him, neither did he forget to draw his pension from the king of Prussia even in times when Frederick was most urgently pressed.[163] It may be said that he was ready to return favours; ‘If things go on as they are going now,’ he wrote with sportive malice, ‘I reckon on having to allow a pension to the king of Prussia.’[164]
It was not surprising that Voltaire did not return to Paris. His correspondence during his residence at Berlin attests in every page of it how bitterly he resented the cabals of ignoble men of letters, and the insolence of ignoble men of authority. ‘If I had been in Paris this Lent,’ he wrote in 1752, ‘I should have been hissed in town, and made sport of at court, and the Siècle de Louis XIV. would have been denounced, as smacking of heresy, as audacious, and full of ill significance. I should have had to go to defend myself in the ante-room of the lieutenant of police. The officers would say, as they saw me pass, _There is a man who belongs to us_.... No, my friend, _qui bene latuit, bene vixit_.’[165] With most just anger, he contrasted German liberality with the tyrannical suspicion of his own government. The emperor, he says, made no difficulty in permitting the publication of a book in which Leopold was called a coward. Holland gave free circulation to statements that the Dutch are ingrates and that their trade is perishing. He was allowed to print under the eyes of the king of Prussia that the Great Elector abased himself uselessly before Lewis XIV., and resisted him as uselessly. It was only in France where permission was refused for an eulogy of Lewis XIV. and of France, and that, because he had been neither base enough nor foolish enough to disfigure his eulogy either by shameful silences or cowardly misrepresentations.[166] The imprisonment, nine years before this, of Lenglet Dufresnoy, an old man of seventy, for no worse offence than publishing a supplement to De Thou’s history, had made a deep impression on Voltaire.[167] He would have been something lower than human if he had forgotten the treatment which he had himself received at the hands of the most feeble and incompetent government that ever was endured by a civilised people.