Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity, he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished. And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of Holy Church as well as her disapproval? It was all in the day’s work. Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of the most variegated experiences. By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small “d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery. He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.