In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell. The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient regime.” Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively civilized--I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great success. But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train himself to fight a duel with the nobleman--whereupon his great friends turned their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, and got out only upon promise to leave France. He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France, it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French absolutism had built about the country.