In his _OEdipus_ he had assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his _Henriade_ (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England we have his _Brutus_ (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his _Zaïre_ (1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if sometimes rather disingenuous, strife with a superior power. Throughout, the poet and man of taste struggles against the philosophic freethinker: he loves the surface impressions, perhaps the reflective illusions; "his sentiments are worth more than his ideas." The _English Letters_ of 1735, written some years before, and now issued with much hesitation, created a great storm: they boldly attacked the royal power, the clergy, the faith; they were burned by the hangman; and Voltaire had to go into voluntary exile for a while. There his literary activity was unwearied: many of his works were written, or at least sketched, during the next five years. Strange problem of the human mind. While he here composed his _Mahomet_ and other serious works, he also wrote his scandalous _Pucelle_; as if he could not rest without destroying all nobility of sentiment and faith in heroism. While Jeanne d'Arc is the helpless victim of his shameless attack, he is also busy with his _Siècle de Louis XIV_, a hero apparently more to his taste than the great Maid of Orléans. The influence of Voltaire on opinion grew slowly but steadily through these years: no one more sedulously undermined the established faiths. It was in these years that he enjoyed a passing favor at the French court, whence his febrile energy, his roughnesses, his want of the true gloss of courtiership, soon lost him the good-will of his old friend Madame de Pompadour. He then tried Berlin, finding it equally untenable ground; eventually he withdrew to Ferney in the territory of Geneva, whence he kept up incessant war against all the injustices which touched his heart. His defence of Calas, of Servin, of the luckless Lally, all date from this time. In these days he animated the Encyclopædists with his spirit, encouraging them in their gigantic undertaking, the "Carroccio of the battle of the eighteenth century." It was a huge dictionary of human knowledge, written in direct antagonism to all belief in spiritual powers or religion. It sold incredibly, and the effect of it on society was immense. This great edifice, "built half of marble, half of mud," as Voltaire himself said, had as its chief architects Diderot and D'Alembert. Nothing contributed more to undermine the foundations on which all institutions, and not least royalty, were built.