Voltaire remained at the Bastille for _twelve days_: he was permitted to have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the king's expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at the governor's table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor's residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see him; his friend Thiériot dined with him; he was given pens, paper, books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. "Using and abusing these opportunities," writes Desnoiresterres, "Voltaire believed that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to give him proof they were alive." "I have been accustomed to all misfortunes," he wrote to Thiériot, "but not yet to that of being utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernières, Madame du Deffand, the Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to ask permission of M. Hérault or M. de Maurepas." At the time of the poet's entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to the governor: "The Sieur de Voltaire is of a _genius_ that requires humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you that the king's intention is that you should secure for him mild treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do not jeopardize the security of his detention." The warrant setting him at liberty was signed on April 26. LA BEAUMELLE. In M. Bournon's list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got printed a new edition of Voltaire's _Age of Louis XIV._, unknown to the author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans. "La Beaumelle," exclaimed Voltaire, "is the first who dared to print another man's work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the _Age of Louis XIV._ has discovered the secret of changing into an infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of the nation." La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques, Voltaire said that "there was scarcely any country where he would not inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here."