As for Voltaire, his proudest title was that of "lay preacher of the religion of 'St.' Catharine." Her correspondence with him, which begins the year after her accession and continues until his death, is in truth a kind of journalism, written partly by herself, partly by others. Its object is to keep the friend of princes and dictator of literary opinion _au courant_ with her ideas, measures, and general policy. She is not content now, however, with the applause of her generation; she aims at commanding the sources of history itself. Here she motions posterity to take its stand behind contemporaries in the church of Voltaire's foundation, while the archpriest of Ferney prostrates himself with iterated formula, "_Te Cathariniam laudamus, te Dominam confitemur_." For St. Catharine was an interested reader of that correspondence of Diderot's with her sculptor Falconet, whose theme is the solidity of posthumous fame. Rulihière had already written an account of the events of 1762, of which he had been an eye-witness; she had tried first to buy him, and then to have him thrown into the Bastille. She will search Venice for a pliable historian; and her own letter on the _coup-d'état_, together with her memoirs, shows how strong in her was that "_besoin de parolier_" analyzed by the great Pascal a century before. Catharine, be quite certain of it, is no earnest seeker after truth; rather "the plain man," with something of the acuteness as well as the insensibility of common-sense. The _Philosophes_ were the interest of the cultivated "as scholars had been in one century, painters in another, theologians in a third." They had the ear of Europe, who rest now in Mr. Morley's bosom. But Catharine confessed years after: "Your learned men in '_ist_' bored me to extinction. There was only my good protector Voltaire. Do you know it was he who made me the mode?"