Industrious as he was, and eager as he was for rural delights and laborious solitude, Voltaire was still pre-eminently social. His letters disclose in him, who really possessed all arts, the art of one who knew how to be graciously respectful to the social superiors who took him for a companion, without forgetting what was due to his own respect for himself. We are all princes or poets, he exclaimed jubilantly on the occasion of one of those nights and suppers of the gods. Such gay-hearted freedom was not always well taken, and in time Voltaire’s eyes were opened to the terms on which he really stood. ‘_Who is the young man who talks so loud?_’ called out some Chevalier Rohan, at one of these sprightly gatherings at the house of the Duke of Sully.[15] ‘_My lord_,’ the young man replied promptly, ‘_he is one who does not carry about a great name, but wins respect for the name he has._’ A few days afterwards the high-spirited patrician magnanimously took an opportunity of having a caning inflicted by the hands of his lackeys on the poet who had thrown away this lesson upon him. Voltaire, who had at all events that substitute for true physical courage which springs up in an intensely irritable and susceptive temperament, forthwith applied himself to practise with the small-sword. He did his best to sting his enemy to fight, but the chevalier either feared the swordsman, or else despised an antagonist of the middle class; and by the influence of the Rohan family the poet once more found himself in the Bastille, then the house of correction at the disposal and for the use of the nobles, the court, and the clergy. Here for six months Voltaire, then only representing a very humble and unknown quantity in men’s minds, chafed and fretted. The pacific Fleury, as is the wont of the pacific when in power, cared less to punish the wrong-doer than to avoid disturbance, knowing that disturbance was most effectually avoided by not meddling with the person most able to resent. The multitude, however, when the day of reckoning came, remembered all these things, and the first act of their passion was to raze to the ground the fortress into which nearly every distinguished champion of the freedom of human intelligence among them had at one time or another been tyrannically thrown.