Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/333

Rh the best company in Paris can say agreeable and instructive ones in a supper of four hours. And what is stranger yet, they dare not tell a man to his face what they have the impudence to print.

The conversation turned at first on a piece of pleasantry in the "Persian Letters," in which it is repeated, after a number of grave personages, that the world is not only growing worse, but that it is becoming depopulated, so that if the proverb should have any truth in it, that "the more fools there are, the more laughter," laughing is likely to be soon banished from the face of the earth.

The Doctor of Sorbonne assured us that, in fact, the world was almost reduced to nothing. He quoted the Father Petau, who demonstrates that in less than three hundred years the descendants of one of the sons of Noah (I forget whether it was Shem or Japheth), amounted to six hundred and twelve millions three hundred and fifty-eight thousand true believers within two hundred and eighty-five years after the universal deluge.

Mr. Andrew asked, why in the time of Philip le Bel, that is to say, about three hundred years after Hugh Capet, there were not six hundred and twenty-three thousand millions of princes of the royal family?

"It is," said the Doctor of Sorbonne, "because the stock of faith has greatly decreased."

A great deal was said about Thebes and its hundred gates, and of the million of soldiers that issued