He must have been tired of fighting and failure, and in need of quiet and change when one of his philosophic marquises--a certain Madame de Rupelmonde--“young, rich, agreeable,” took him with her in July, 1722, as her guest, on a trip to Holland. Her witty companion of eight-and-twenty was in no sense her lover. The few _convenances_ there were left in those days quite permitted such an association. The two had for each other merely a gallant friendship. Madame was a widow, of easy virtue, and fashionable enough to have religious doubts--to wish to be taught to think. As they jolted leisurely in her post-chaise over the rough roads of old France they had plenty of time to discuss fate, free will, life, death, and the theologies. Voltaire found time, too, during the trip, to answer Madame’s questions by an “Epistle to Uranie”--in which he gave, in a few graceful pages, and with the admirable terseness and lucidity which were to be the hall-mark of all his writings, the most powerful objections to Christianity. It was his first open avowal of Deism. How long he had cherished that belief and outgrown all others, cannot be told. The whole temper of his mind was rationalistic. Christianity had come to him through the muddy channel of French Roman Catholicism in the eighteenth century. He began by disbelieving the shameless superstitions with which the Churchmen darkened and debased the understanding of the people. He ended by disbelieving everything which his reason could not follow. The process is easy and not uncommon. The philosophic pair were much fêted _en route_. “Œdipe” was performed when they were at Cambrai, as a delicate compliment. There was a Congress going on there too; and Voltaire wrote gaily therefrom to Cardinal Dubois (who was archbishop of the place but had never even seen it) one of those audacious, easy letters which were his _forte_, and which Dubois and Theriot between them passed round the salons of Paris. Voltaire and Madame were at Cambrai for some five or six weeks, and then went on to Brussels. Here lived now J. B. Rousseau, fifty-two years old, who from wit and licence had passed to dulness and orthodoxy. Of course the poets met. Voltaire had not seen Rousseau since he was a schoolboy, and Rousseau had been shown him as a prodigy for imitation. To the gay, unsparing logic of the younger poet the old one did not appear at all in the light of a prodigy now. “He despises me because I neglect rhyme, and I despise him because he can do nothing but rhyme,” said Voltaire carelessly.