police at the time of Voltaire's imprisonment.

Vous venez de mettre à la Bastille [says the writer, who, it is
supposed, was an ecclesiastic] un homme que je souhaitais y voir il
y a plus de 15 années.

The writer goes on to speak of the

métier que faisait l'homme en question, prêchant le déisme tout à
découvert aux toilettes de nos jeunes seigneurs ... L'Ancien
Testament, selon lui, n'est qu'un tissu de contes et de fables, les
apôtres étaient de bonnes gens idiots, simples, et crédules, et les
pères de l'Eglise, Saint Bernard surtout, auquel il en veut le
plus, n'étaient que des charlatans et des suborneurs.

'Je voudrais être homme d'authorité,' he adds, 'pour un jour seulement,
afin d'enfermer ce poète entre quatre murailles pour toute sa vie.' That
Voltaire at this early date should have already given rise to such pious
ecclesiastical wishes shows clearly enough that he had little to learn
from the deists of England. And, in the second place, the deists of
England had very little to teach a disciple of Bayle, Fontenelle, and
Montesquieu. They were, almost without exception, a group of second-rate
and insignificant writers whose 'onslaught' upon current beliefs was
only to a faint extent 'systematic and reasoned.' The feeble and
fluctuating rationalism of Toland and Wollaston, the crude and confused
rationalism of Collins, the half-crazy rationalism of Woolston, may each
and all, no doubt, have furnished Voltaire with arguments and
suggestions, but they cannot have seriously influenced his thought.
Bolingbroke was a more important figure, and he was in close personal
relation with Voltaire; but his controversial writings were clumsy and