for half the tiresome visitors it procured him.

The poet lived like a prince, but kept his accounts like a citizen;
knowing to a sous where his money went: a good deal of it was bestowed
charitably, for he was munificent, and certainly much loved in his
neighbourhood. One night, when _Tancrede_ was acting, and the court of
the chateau was full of carriages and servants, there arrived, as ill
luck would have it, a cask of the best chambertin that ever came from
Burgundy; his own people could not attend to it, and the cask remained
at his cellar door; the servants contrived to get at it, and while their
masters and mistresses were shedding tears at the tragedy, they sipped
the poet's wine. There was generally a supper after the play, where more
than once two hundred people sat down, and Voltaire had something to say
to every one of his guests. As the gates of the town are shut at night,
many of them usually remained in the _château_, poorly accommodated with
beds. One night as M. de B----, was groping in the dark, for a place
where he might lie down to sleep, he accidently put his finger into the
mouth of M. de Florian, who bit it.

Voltaire kept company only with the aristocracy of Geneva; neither his
liberality nor his wit secured him the good-will of the patriots placed
out of the sphere of his influence; they only saw him a sham
philosopher, without principles and solidity; a courtier, the slave of
rank and fashion; the corrupter of their country, of which he made a
jest. _Quand je secoue ma perruque,_ he used to say, _je poudre toute la
republique!_

Whatever might be Voltaire's antipathy to the visits of strangers at his
_château_, he seems to have met with an equal specimen of that temper
from an Englishman. When in London, he waited upon Congreve, the poet,