The _Siecle de Louis XIV._ was published next year. Voltaire's insatiable cupidity, his tricks, his tempers, his vindictiveness, shown in the _Diatribe du Docteur Akakia_ (an embittered attack on Maupertuis), alienated the King; when "the orange" of Voltaire's genius "was sucked" he would "throw away the rind." With unwilling delays, and the humiliation of an arrest at Frankfort, Voltaire escaped from the territory of the royal "Solomon" (1753), and attracted to Switzerland by its spirit of toleration, found himself in 1755 tenant of the chateau which he named Les Delices, near Geneva, his "summer palace," and that of Monrion, his "winter palace," in the neighbourhood of Lausanne. His pen was busy: the tragedy _L'Orphelin de la Chine_, tales, fugitive verses, the poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, with its doubtful assertion of Providence as a slender counterpoise to the certainty of innumerable evils in the world, pursued one another in varied succession. Still keeping in his hands Les Delices, he purchased in 1758 the chateau and demesne of Ferney on French soil, and became a kind of prince and patriarch, a territorial lord, wisely benevolent to the little community which he made to flourish around him, and at the same time the intellectual potentate of Europe. Never had his brain been more alert and indefatigable. The years from 1760 to 1778 were years of incessant activity. Tragedy, comedy, opera, epistles, satires, tales in verse, _La Pucelle_,[1] _Le Pauvre Diable_ (admirable in its malignity), literary criticism, a commentary on Corneille (published for the benefit of the great dramatist's grandniece), brilliant tales in prose, the _Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations_, the _Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand_, with other voluminous historical works, innumerable writings in philosophy, in religious polemics, including many articles of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, in politics, in jurisprudence, a vast correspondence which extended his influence over the whole of Europe--these are but a part of the achievement of a sexagenarian progressing to become an octogenarian. [Footnote 1: First authorised edition, 1762; surreptitiously printed, 1755.]