It is easy to point a sneer at a high priest of humanity jobbing in the funds. Only let us remember that Voltaire never made any pretence of being a high priest of humanity; that his transactions were substantially very like those of any banker or merchant of to-day; and that for a man who was preaching new opinions it was extremely prudent to place himself out of the necessity of pleasing booksellers or the pit of the theatre on the one hand, and on the other to supply himself with ready means of frequent flight from the ceaseless persecutions of authority. Envious scribes in his lifetime taunted him with avarice, and the evil association still clings to his memory now that he is dead. One can only say that good and high-minded men, who never shrank from withstanding him when in fault, men like Condorcet for example, heard such talk with disdain, and set it down to the disgraceful readiness of men to credit anything that relieves them from having to admire[82]. The people who dislike prudence in matters of money in those whose distinction is intellectual or spiritual, resemble a sentimental lover who should lose his illusions at sight of his mistress eating a hearty meal. Is their lot, then, cast in the ethereal fluid of the interstellar spaces? At all events Voltaire had two important gifts which do not commonly belong to the avaricious; he was a generous helper alike of those who had, and those who had not, a claim upon him, and he knew how to bear serious losses with unbroken composure. Michel, the receiver-general, became bankrupt, and Voltaire lost a considerable sum of money in consequence. His fluency of invective and complaint, which was simply boundless when any obscure scribbler earned a guinea by a calumny upon him, went no farther on the occasion of this very substantial injury than a single splenetic phrase, and a harmless quatrain: Michel au nom de l’Eternel, Mit jadis le diable en déroute; Mais, après cette banqueroute, Que le diable emporte Michel! It has been fairly asked whether a genuine miser would content himself with a stanza upon the man who had robbed him.[83] His correspondence with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha shows him declining to accept the thousand louis, which she had sent as a fee for the composition of the Annales de l’Empire.