The play has indeed the perfect smoothness and elegance dear to the French soul. All the unities are nicely observed, and there is never an anachronism. But to make it the astounding success it was, it must have had in it something better even than the brilliant ingenuity of a Voltaire--something better even than a Voltaire’s perfect knowledge of the human nature for which he was writing. It contained the first trumpet call of the Voltairian message. The house was crowded. It was the custom of the day for the playwright to beat up his friends and engage them to applaud the first steps of the child of his brain. But here also were enemies and neutrals--all Paris agog to see the next move in the game of a daring player. Among the audience, half grumbling, half delighted, was old Maître Arouet. “The rascal! the rascal!” he muttered, as some bold touch brought down the house. Brother Armand should have been there too, to have heard the strangely passionate enthusiasm with which was received the couplet which, after all, merely referred to the pagan priesthood of a long dead age: Our priests are not what a foolish people think them! Our credulity makes all their knowledge. But “when fanaticism has once gangrened a brain, the malady is incurable,” said Voltaire; and neither he nor any other could alter an Armand. A certain Maréchale de Villars--_galante_, coquette, with all the easy _ton_ learnt in Courts, and all the French woman’s _aplomb_ and grace to make five-and-thirty more dangerous than five-and-twenty--leant curiously out of her box presently to watch a young buffoon of an actor who was doing his best to ruin M. de Voltaire’s play. The high priest, in a scene essentially grave and tragic, has as train-bearer a lean-faced, narrow-shouldered, boyish-looking youth who must needs take _his_ part as comic, and make a fool not of himself only but of his high priest also. Who is the ridiculous boy? M. de Voltaire. It appears deliciously piquant to the Maréchale that an author should run the risk of damning his own work for a jest. What a refreshing person to have to stay when one is a little bored! Madame receives him in her box--he knows quite well how to behave and how to be as affable, daring, and amusing as could be wished--and they begin a friendship, not without result.