We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it sounds. But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirable strategic location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him. The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone. Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous correspondence--more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the world was now to see.