.

My dear child, the weather is beginning to settle down into a fine frost." The "frost" not only affected Voltaire's relations with his brethren in philosophy, it reached even to the king himself.

A far from creditable lawsuit with a Jew completed Frederick's irritation.

He forbade the poet to appear in his presence before the affair was over.

"Brother Voltaire is doing penance here," wrote the latter to the Margravine of Baireuth, the King of Prussia's amiable sister he has a beast of a lawsuit with a Jew, and, according to the law of the Old Testament, there will be something more to pay for having been robbed.