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 clergymen with whom he associated while almost a boy. The Abbé Servien, uncle of the Duke of Sully, is described by St Simon as one of the most agreeable of men, but so dissolute that nobody of repute would have anything to do with him, which did not prevent Voltaire from being a great friend of his. The Abbé was imprisoned in Vincennes in 1714 for some disrespectful pleasantry about the king; and Voltaire, one of whose conspicuous virtues was constancy to friends in distress, addressed to him a long poem, complimenting him as an eminent man of pleasure, and exhorting him to keep up his spirits. Unfortunately the Abbé had not much time in which to profit by his young friend's counsels, for he died the following year. A still more singular epistle to be addressed to a divine is that "To M. l'Abbé de—, who bewailed the Death of his Mistress." It begins thus:—

and after much remonstrance on the inutility and folly of his grief, and a glance at the "constancy of a churchman's love," ends by advising him to take refuge from sadness in the arms of pleasure. The Abbé Chaulieu, another friend, nearly eighty, was a poet, a voluptuary, and a sceptic. The Abbé Desfontaines, a later acquaintance, befriended by Voltaire, was much worse than any