Arouet had not written them. But that did not matter. He might have written them. They were after his manner. Besides, had he not been in exile and disgrace, and was he not still so wicked that his good old father would not have him in the house, and he was living an outcast in furnished lodgings? These reasonings would have been conclusive alone. Then he was known to be the moving spirit at Sceaux, and Sceaux was but another name for disaffection. A spy, Beauregard, swore to a conversation he had had with Arouet, in which Arouet, with a most unnatural imprudence, avowed himself the author of both satires with much circumstantial detail; and added “things not mentionable” about the Duchesse du Berri. He went his way quite gaily for a while, however. His “Œdipe” had been accepted, and was actually in rehearsal at the theatre. Here was a triumph indeed. He was still beloved of all the salons and the women--dear, delightful, dangerous. He had the keenest sense of humour to help him through these little _contretemps_ of existence. He would, now at least, hardly have missed his _mot_ to save his skin--and he held that dear, as the physically weak are apt to do. He was sauntering one day, on May 15, 1717, through the Palais Royal Gardens, runs the story, when he was called into the presence of the Regent, also sauntering there. “I bet you, M. Arouet,” says Philip, “I will show you something you have never seen before.” “What is that, Monseigneur?” “The inside of the Bastille.” “I take it as seen,” replies Arouet airily. He could, all things considered, have been very little surprised when on May 16th, Whitsunday, while he was still sleeping calmly in bed, he was served with a _lettre de cachet_, his room and person ignominiously searched, and himself removed the next day to that historic prison. Perhaps he smiled a little, but not bitterly, when they discovered on him Pimpette’s poor little note. “I am not made for the passions,” he said a year or two later. He was not. A great work and a great passion seldom run together. The work must be the only passion one has. The prison was not very painful, it appears. Arouet was allowed an excellent room, books, a fire, good wine, first-rate coffee, the use of the bowling-green and the billiard-room, visitors, to a reasonable extent, and often a seat at the governor’s dinner-table. Some of the King’s guests might be rotting forgotten for unknown crimes in the dungeons beneath; but, although almost all the literary men of the period were bastilled some time or other in their lives, they unite in praising the prison as very reasonably comfortable.