The moment a feeling of injustice on one side, and of assumption of direction on the other, showed themselves, a thousand circumstances arose to embitter the intercourse of the unequal friends. The king had a favourite guest, la Metrie, a physician by profession, the worst, Voltaire tells us, that ever practised, an unprincipled fellow, but witty and vivacious; whose good spirits, and bold and infidel opinions, pleased Frederic, who made him his reader. This sort of man is never suited to a court. The same restless aspiration after independence that renders a man an infidel in opinions makes him a bad courtier. [Sidenote: Sept. 2. 1751. Ætat. 57.] "La Metrie," writes Voltaire to his niece, "boasts in his prefaces of his extreme felicity in being near a great king, who sometimes reads his poems to him; but, in secret, he weeps with me; he would leave this place on foot: and I--why am I here? You will be astonished at what I tell you. La Metrie swore to me the other day, that, when speaking to the king of my pretended favour, and of the petty jealousy that it excites, he replied, 'I shall not want him for more than a year longer: one squeezes the orange, and throws away the peel.'" These words sank deep in Voltaire's mind; and not less deeply did the king feel an expression of the irritable poet, who called himself Frederic's laundress, and said, when he corrected the royal poems, that he was washing the king's dirty linen. Such heedless speeches, carried from one to the other by the thoughtless or the malicious, destroyed every feeling of attachment, and circumstances soon concurred to inspire both with mistrust, to inspire the weaker with a desire of throwing off his chains, and the stronger with a more unworthy determination of adding to their weight.