Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor, a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin. “Maupertuis has not easygoing springs,” the poet wrote to his niece; “he takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant. It is said that a little envy enters into his calculations.” Already Voltaire’s touchy vanity was shying at the rivals he encountered in the king’s favor. “So it is known, then, by this time at Paris, my dear child,” he writes to his niece, “that we have played the Mort de Cesar at Potsdam, that Prince Henry is a good actor, has no accent, and is very amiable, and that this is the place for pleasure? All that is true . . . but . . . The king’s supper-parties are delightful; at them people talk reason, wit, science; freedom prevails thereat; he is the soul of it all; no ill temper, no clouds, at any rate no storms; my life is free and well occupied . . . but . . . Opera, plays, carousals, suppers at Sans- Souci, military manoeuvres, concerts, studies, readings . . but . . The city of Berlin, grand, better laid out than Paris; palaces, play-houses, affable parish priests, charming princesses, maids of honor beautiful and well made; the mansion of Madame de Tyrconnel always full, and sometimes too much so . . . but . . . but. . . . My dear child, the weather is beginning to settle down into a fine frost.” The “frost” not only affected Voltaire’s relations with his brethren in philosophy, it reached even to the king himself. A far from creditable lawsuit with a Jew completed Frederick’s irritation. He forbade the poet to appear in his presence before the affair was over. “Brother Voltaire is doing penance here,” wrote the latter to the Margravine of Baireuth, the King of Prussia’s amiable sister he has a beast of a lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, there will be something more to pay for having been robbed. . . .” Frederick, on his side, writes to his sister, “You ask me what the lawsuit is in which Voltaire is involved with a Jew. It is a case of a rogue wanting to cheat a thief. It is intolerable that a man of Voltaire’s intellect should make so unworthy an abuse of it. The affair is in the hands of justice; and, in a few days, we shall know from the sentence which is the greater rogue of the two. Voltaire lost his temper, flew in the Jew’s face, and, in fact, behaved like a madman. I am waiting for this affair to be over to put his head under the pump or reprimand him severely (_lui laver la tete_), and see whether, at the age of fifty-six, one cannot make him, if not reasonable, at any rate less of a rogue.”