_Histoire Universelle_. That book had shown the world's history as a
part of the providential order--a grand unfolding of design. Voltaire's
view was very different. To him, as to Montesquieu, natural causes alone
were operative in history; but this was not all; in his eyes there was
one influence which, from the earliest ages, had continually retarded
the progress of humanity, and that influence was religious belief. Thus
his book, though far more brilliant and far more modern than that of
Bossuet, was nevertheless almost equally biased. It was history with a
thesis, and the gibe of Montesquieu was justifiable. 'Voltaire,' he
said, 'writes history to glorify his own convent, like any Benedictine
monk.' Voltaire's 'convent' was the philosophical school in Paris; and
his desire to glorify it was soon to appear in other directions.

The _Essai sur les Moeurs_ is an exceedingly amusing narrative, but it
is a long and learned work filling several volumes, and the fruit of
many years of research. Voltaire was determined henceforward to distil
its spirit into more compendious and popular forms. He had no more time
for elaborate dissertations; he must reach the public by quicker and
surer ways. Accordingly there now began to pour into Paris a flood of
short light booklets--essays, plays, poems, romances, letters, tracts--a
multitude of writings infinitely varied in form and scope, but all
equally irresistible and all equally bearing the unmistakable signs of
their origin at Ferney. Voltaire's inimitable style had at last found a
medium in which it could display itself in all its charm and all its
brilliance. The pointed, cutting, mocking sentences laugh and dance
through his pages like light-toed, prick-eared elves. Once seen, and
there is no help for it--one must follow, into whatever dangerous and
unknown regions those magic imps may lead. The pamphlets were of course
forbidden, but without effect; they were sold in thousands, and new
cargoes, somehow or other, were always slipping across the frontier from