From that modish courtly life the man who had been François Marie Arouet was summoned home in the December of 1721 to the death-bed of his old father. A strange group gathered round it--Catherine, Madame Mignot, a middle-aged married woman; Armand, the austere and surly Jansenist of eight-and-thirty; and the most brilliant man in France. Good old Maître Arouet went the way of all flesh, trusting greatly neither in his “fool in prose” nor his “fool in verse,” but leaving Prose a post in the Chamber of Accounts which brought in thirteen thousand francs yearly, and Verse a sum which afforded him four thousand odd francs per annum. He had appointed a trustee and guardian, with whom Verse, who was always what his valets thereafter charitably called _vif_, immediately quarrelled. The guardian was indeed such a dilatory old person that it took him four years to divide the estate among Maître Arouet’s children; and two years after his father’s death Voltaire was writing lugubriously to Theriot, “I shall be obliged to work to live, after having lived to work.” Things were not quite so bad as that, however. When he left the Bastille the Regent had given him a pension of twelve hundred francs. And now, a few days after his father’s death, in January, 1722, the boy King, Louis XV., made him a further pension of two thousand francs. From this moment Voltaire never spent his whole income. In no other concern of his life has he been so much misrepresented as in his dealings with money matters. It is hard to see why for all other men independence should be considered honourable and a freedom of the spirit, and grinding poverty an inspiration and liberty only to the man of letters. But the peculiarly foolish idea that genius cannot be genius if it understands its bank-book, and that great truths can only come from a garret and an ill-fed brain, is not yet extinct. Many of Voltaire’s biographers feel that they have to apologise for him paying his bills regularly, hunting out his creditors, and investing his money with shrewdness and caution. It would have been so much more romantic to have flung it about royally--and then borrowed someone else’s! But Voltaire knew that “poverty enervates the courage.” He never uttered a truer word. If it was his mission to whip the world’s apathy into action with unpalatable truths, he could not depend on that world for the bread he put into his mouth and the coat he put on his back. “Ask nothing of anyone; need no one.” “My vocation is to say what I think _fari quæ sentiam_.” If Voltaire had been insolvent the Voltairian message could never have been uttered.