"Here be we, three or four foreigners, like monks in an abbey," he wrote; "please God the father abbot may content himself with making fun of us." Literary or philosophical questions already gave rise sometimes to disagreements.

"I am at present correcting the second edition which the King of Prussia is going to publish of the history of his country," wrote Voltaire; "fancy! in order to appear more impartial, he falls tooth and nail on his grandfather.

I have lightened the blows as much as I could.
I rather like this grandfather, because he displayed magnificence, and has left some fine monuments.

I had great trouble about softening down the terms in which the grandson reproaches his ancestor for his vanity in having got himself made a king; it is a vanity from which his descendants derive pretty solid advantages, and the title is not at all a disagreeable one.

At last I said to him, 'It is your grandfather, it is not mine; do what you please with him,' and I confined myself to weeding the expressions." Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor, a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin.
"Maupertuis has not easygoing springs," the poet wrote to his niece; "he takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant.