The little book called "_Cymbalum Mundi_," which is merely a cold imitation of Lucian, and which has not the slightest or remotest reference to Christianity, was condemned to be burned. But Rabelais was printed "_cum privilegio_"; and a free course was allowed to the "Turkish Spy," and even to the "Persian Letters"; that volatile, ingenious, and daring work, in which there is one whole letter in favor of suicide; another in which we find these words: "If we suppose such a thing as religion;" a third, in which it is expressly said that "the bishops have no other functions than dispensing with the observance of the laws"; and, finally, another in which the pope is said to be a magician, who makes people believe that three are one, and that the bread we eat is not bread, etc. The Abbé St. Pierre, a man who could frequently deceive himself, but who never wrote without a view to the public good, and whose works were called by Cardinal Dubois, "The dreams of an honest citizen"; the Abbé St. Pierre, I say, was unanimously expelled from the French Academy for having, in some political work, preferred the establishment of councils under the regency to that of secretaries of state under Louis XIV.; and for saying that towards the close of that glorious reign the finances were wretchedly conducted. The author of the "Persian Letters" has not mentioned Louis XIV. in his book, except to say that he was a magician who could make his subjects believe that paper was money; that he liked no government but that of Turkey; that he preferred a man who handed him a napkin to a man who gained him battles; that he had conferred a pension on a man who had run away two leagues, and a government upon another who had run away four; that he was overwhelmed with poverty, although it is said, in the same letter, that his finances are inexhaustible. Observe, then, I repeat, all that this writer, in the only work then known to be his, has said of Louis XIV., the patron of the French Academy. We may add, too, as a climax of contradiction, that that society admitted him as a member for having turned them into ridicule; for, of all the books by which the public have been entertained at the expense of the society, there is not one in which it has been treated more disrespectfully than in the "Persian Letters." See that letter wherein he says, "The members of this body have no other business than incessantly to chatter; panegyric comes and takes its place as it were spontaneously in their eternal gabble," etc. After having thus treated this society, they praise him, on his introduction, for his skill in drawing likenesses.