Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/166

 "M. de Voltaire has always been constant to his friends. His character is impetuous, his heart good and compassionate. He is modest in the highest degree on the subject of the praises which have been lavished on him by kings, people of letters, and the whole nation. Profound and just in his judgments on the works of others, full of amenity, of politeness, and of grace in his intercourse with the world—inflexible towards those who have offended him,—there you have his character drawn from nature."

But whatever his achievements or his fame, he never attained to so much favour at Versailles as would have secured him from persecution. He found it impossible to propitiate the laced suit and perruque which called themselves Louis XV., and which resemble nothing so much as Feathertop, who was put together, clothed, and inspired with a kind of vitality, by the old witch in Hawthorne's tale; or what may have been the original of Feathertop, in the "Dunciad:"—

Voltaire's post of Historiographer-Royal gave him admission to Court, but he could not join the privileged few who passed beyond the antechamber, and perhaps never, in all his famed existence, could boast of being present when his sovereign changed his shirt. In despotic monarchies, access to the king's person, even if it be only to powder his wig, is a matter of, high importance; for the dexterous use of a moment of good-humour or caprice in the source of all honour and prosperity, a pretty speech, or an apt flattery, or that mysterious and debasing quality, a talent for intrigue, may be the making of a courtier.