When building his house at Ferney, the neighboring Catholic curés interfered with him. They prohibited the laborers from working for him. To meet this difficulty he determined to obtain the protection of the Pope himself. So he wrote to the Pope, asking for a relic to put in the church he had built, and received in return a piece of the hair-shirt of St. Francis. He went to mass frequently. Meantime, in his letters to his brother freethinkers, he added his usual postscript, "Ecrasez l'Infâme;" begging their aid in crushing Catholicism and Christianity. Yet it does not seem that he considered himself a hypocrite in thus conforming outwardly to a religion which he hated. He thinks that others who do so are hypocrites, but not that he is one. In 1764 he writes to Madame du Deffand, "The worst is that we are surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think what they themselves do not think at all." So singular are the self-deceptions of the human mind. He writes to Frederic ridiculing the sacrament of extreme unction, and then solemnly partakes of the eucharist. Certainly he did not belong to the noble army of martyrs. He expected to overturn a great religious system, not by the power of faith, but by ingenious pamphlets, brilliant sarcasms, adroit deceptions. In thus thinking he was eminently superficial. His theory on this subject is given in an article in the "Dictionnaire Philosophique," quoted by Mr. Parton: "Distinguish honest people who think, from the populace who were not made to think. If usage obliges you to perform a ridiculous ceremony for the sake of the canaille, and on the road you meet some people of understanding, notify them by a sign of the head, or a look, that you think as they do.... If imbeciles still wish to eat acorns, let them have acorns."