Both worked unremittingly. His authorship of the Preface immediately flung open to d’Alembert all the _salons_ in Paris, and for the first time in his life he began to go into society. Then Frederick the Great made him a rich and splendid offer, the Presidency of the Berlin Academy. Consider that though the man was famous he was still very poor. The little pension which was his all ‘is hardly enough to keep me if I have the happiness or the misfortune to live to be old.’ From the Government of his country he feared everything and hoped nothing. He was only thirty-five years of age. A new world was opened to him. The glazier’s attic he could exchange for a palace, and the homely kindness of an illiterate foster-mother for the magnificent endearments of a philosophic king. Was it only the painful example of friend Voltaire’s angry wretchedness as Frederick’s guest that made him refuse an offer so lavish and so dazzling? It was rather that he had the rare wisdom to recognise happiness when he had it and did not mistake it for some phantom will-o’-the-wisp whom distance clothed with light. ‘The peace I enjoy is so perfect,’ he wrote, ‘I dare run no risk of disturbing it.... I do not doubt the King’s goodness ... only that the conditions essential to happiness are not in his power.’ Any man who is offered in place of quiet content that most fleeting and unsubstantial of all chimeras--fame and glory--should read d’Alembert’s answer to Frederick the Great. Frederick’s royal response to it was the offer of a pension of twelve hundred livres. In September 1754 the fourth volume of the Encyclopædia was hailed by the world with a burst of enthusiasm and applause, and in the December of that year d’Alembert received as a reward for his indefatigable labours a chair in the French Academy. He had only accepted it on condition that he spoke his mind freely on all points and made court to no man. The speech with which he took his seat, though constantly interrupted with clapping and cries of delight, was not good, said Grimm. All d’Alembert’s addresses and _éloges_ spoken at the Academy leave posterity, indeed, as cold as they left the astute German journalist. The man was a mathematician, a creature of reason. The passion that was to rule that reason and dominate his life was not the gaudy and shallow passion of the orator. In 1756 he went to stay with the great head of his party, Voltaire, at the Délices, near Geneva. The Patriarch was sixty-two years old, but with the activity and the enthusiasm of youth. At his house and at his table d’Alembert met constantly and observed deeply the Calvinistic pastors of Geneva. He returned to Paris with his head full of the most famous article the Encyclopædia was to know. At the back of his mind was a certain request of his host’s, that he should also make a few remarks on the benefits that play-acting would confer on the Calvinistic temperament.