Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/157

 years old? But go on with your Voltaire, Mark."

"You mean Johnson," said Mark; "how he would have cackled had he known that Voltaire got his start in literature by the library he bought as a youngster out of Ninon de l'Enclos' two thousand livres bequest. 'Authorship reared on a wench's patrimony,' I hear him expectorate, and George Rex would have been tickled to death, for Johnson, he would have argued, has now extracted the sting from the Frenchman's description of Kings, as 'a pack of rogues and highwaymen.'"

As he was speaking Mark grabbed hold of his elbow, indulging in a grimace of pain. "What's the date?" he demanded abruptly.

"August 25th."

"Late, as usual," said Mark with mock mournfulness. "True friends of mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for good measure."

"What happened on May 14th?"

"Why, you ignoramus, on May 14th, in the year I have forgot, the humanest and royalest of kings, Henri IV, was assassinated by a damned monk." 153