Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/86

 had Jong been the dear and intimate friend of Voltaire, had represented with extraordinary effect most of his heroines, and had played Jocasta only five days before her death. He had been summoned to her deathbed, and she died in his arms. Such was the woman to whom the clergy of Paris refused Christian burial, because of her profession. Her body was taken secretly by night in a hackney-coach to the bank of the Seine, not very far from where is now the Pont de la Concorde, and there hastily interred. It may be imagined with what feelings Voltaire, bringing with him from England a tenfold horror of fanaticism, beheld this outrage; and those feelings, which he himself describes as "indignation, tenderness, and pity," found expression in verse; —