‘But how will you receive him?’ ‘Receive him ... I will give him supper, put him in my own bed, and say, There is a good supper; this is the best bed in the house; do me the pleasure to accept one and the other, and to make yourself happy here[76].’ One does not understand the terrible man, without remembering always how much of the hot generosity of the child he kept in his nature to the last. When the very Jesuits were suppressed with circumstances of extreme harshness, he pitied even them, and took one of their number permanently into his household[77]. The most important part of a man’s private conduct after that which concerns his relations with women and his family, is generally that which concerns his way of dealing with money, because money in its acquisition and its dispersion is the outward and visible sign of the absence or of the presence of so many inward and spiritual graces. As has often been said, it is the measure of some of the most important of a man’s virtues, his honesty, his industry, his generosity, his self-denial, and most of the other elements in keeping the difficult balance between his care for himself and his care for other people. Voltaire perceived very early in life that to be needy was to be dependent; that the rich and poor are as hammer and anvil; that the chronicles of genius demonstrate that it is not by genius that men either make a fortune or live happy lives. He made up his mind from the beginning that the author of the French epic would not share the poverty and straitened lives of Tasso and Milton, and that he for his part would at any rate be hammer and not anvil.[78] I was so wearied, he wrote in 1752, of the humiliations that dishonour letters, that to stay my disgust I resolved to make what scoundrels call a great fortune.[79] He used to give his books away to the printers. He had a small fortune from his father; he is said to have made two thousand pounds by the English subscriptions to the Henriade; and he did not hide his talent in the ground, but resorted skilfully to all sorts of speculations in stocks, army contracts, and other authorised means of converting one livre into two while you sleep. He lent large sums of money, presumably at handsome interest, to the Duke of Richelieu and others, and though the interest may have been handsome, the trouble of procuring it was often desperate.[80] Yet after much experience Voltaire came to the conclusion that though he had sometimes lost money by bankers, by the devout, by the people of the Old Testament, who would have had many scruples about a larded capon, who would rather die than not be idle on the sabbath, and not be thieving on the Sunday, yet he had lost nothing by the great except his time.[81]