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 Assembly of France made Louis XVI sign a decree ordering Voltaire's remains to be transferred to Paris. This was done with great pomp and ceremony. A long procession with banners and music passed through the city. An immense sarcophagus, forty feet high, surmounted by a full-length figure of Voltaire and a winged figure of Immortality, was drawn along by twelve white horses. On it was written, "He avenged Callas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montbailli. Poet, philosopher, historian, he gave a great impulse to the human mind; he prepared us to become free." A hundred thousand people walked in the procession through crowds of hundreds of thousands more. The body was buried in the Panthéon. But this was not its last resting-place. In 1814, on the restoration of the Bourbon Kings, his bones were removed and thrown into a waste place outside the city. This was discovered in 1864, when his heart, which had been in the possession of the Villette family, was placed inside the empty tomb.

It has been impossible to enumerate even Voltaire's principal writings, but mention must be made of one of the most remarkable of his works, which was his "Philosophical Dictionary." It contained brief articles on an enormous variety of subjects, each one brimful of interest, whether they were treated with serious thought and profound learning or with sarcasm and biting irony. He kept on adding to it until it reached eight volumes, and, needless to say, it