In 1770, when he was twenty-seven, he went with d’Alembert to stay at Ferney. Voltaire was delighted with him. Here was a man after his own heart, with his own hatred of oppression and fanaticism and his own zeal for humanity, with better chances of serving it! The Patriarch did not add, as he might have added, that this young Condorcet had a thousand virtues a Voltaire could never compass--that he was pure in life and hated a lie; that he was wholly without jealousy, without vanity, and without meanness. Caritat soon worshipped at the feet of a master of whom his friendship with d’Alembert had already proclaimed him a pupil, while Voltaire enlisted his guest’s quiet, practical help for the rehabilitation of the Chevalier de la Barre, for the revision of the process of d’Étallonde; and honoured him by becoming his editor and assistant in the critical ‘Commentary on Pascal’ which Condorcet produced later. Because his humility was the humility of a just mind and his modesty of the kind that scorns to cringe, Condorcet’s admiration for his host did not blind him to his literary faults or make him meanly spare them; and while it was Condorcet who spoke in warm eulogy of his ‘dear and illustrious chief’ as working not for his glory but for his cause, it was also Condorcet who deprecated that production of Voltaire’s senility, ‘Irène.’ Sometimes the three friends would talk over the future of France--the two older men who had done much to mould that future and the young man who had much to do. ‘You will see great days,’ old Voltaire wrote afterwards to his guest; ‘you will make them.’ The visit lasted a fortnight, and was a liberal education indeed. Three years later, in 1773, Condorcet received the crown of his success as a mathematician and was made Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, where he wrote _éloges_ of the savants who had belonged to it, with the noble motto for ever in his mind, ‘One owes to the dead only what is useful to the living--justice and truth.’ So far, Condorcet had been a mathematician alone. Knowledge might free and redeem the world--in time; but the time was long. Beneath that quiet exterior, palpitating through his leisurely, exact studies at the College of Navarre and the Scientific Academy, there throbbed in this man’s breast a vaster and fiercer passion than any passion for learning--the passion for human-kind. Where did young Condorcet come by that ruling idea of his that opened to him a field of labour which he must till all his days, unremittingly, before the night cometh when no man can work--that idea which should steel him to endure, exulting, the cruellest torments of life and death--‘the infinite perfectibility of human nature, the infinite augmentation of human happiness’? The friend of d’Alembert was Condorcet, the geometrician; the friend of Turgot was Condorcet, the reformer.