"Try him in the Diplomatic line; break these bad habits and connections, thought M. Arouet, at one time; and sent him to the French Ambassador in Holland,--on good behavior, as it were, and by way of temporary banishment. But neither did this answer. On the contrary, the young fellow got into scrapes again; got into amatory intrigues,--young lady visiting you in men's clothes, young lady's mother inveigling, and I know not what;--so that the Ambassador was glad to send him home again unmarried; marked, as it were, 'Glass, with care!' And the young lady's mother printed his Letters, not the least worth reading:--and the old M. Arouet seems now to have flung up his head; to have settled some small allowance on him, with peremptory no hope of more, and said, 'Go your own way, then, foolish junior: the elder shall be my son.' M. Arouet disappears at this point, or nearly so, from the history of his son Francois; and I think must have died in not many years. Poor old M. Arouet closed his old eyes without the least conception what a prodigious ever-memorable thing he had done unknowingly, in sending this Francois into the world, to kindle such universal 'dry dung-heap of a rotten world,' and set it blazing! Francois, his Father's synonym, came to be representative of the family, after all; the elder Brother also having died before long. Except certain confused niece-and-nephew personages, progeny of the sisters, Francois has no more trouble or solacement from the paternal household. Francois meanwhile is his Father's synonym, and signs Arouet Junior, 'Francois Aroue l. j. (LE JEUNE).' "'All of us Princes, then, or Poets!' said he, one night at supper, looking to right and left: the brightest fellow in the world, well fit to be Phoebus Apollo of such circles; and great things now ahead of him. Dissolute Regent d'Orleans, politest, most debauched of men, and very witty, holds the helm; near him Dubois the Devil's Cardinal, and so many bright spirits. All the Luciferous Spiritualism there is in France is lifting anchor, under these auspices, joyfully towards new latitudes and Isles of the Blest. What may not Francois hope to become? 'Hmph!' answers M. Arouet Senior, steadily, so long as he lives. Here are one or two subsequent phases, epochs or turning-points, of the young gentleman's career.