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Wise men, under such terrible circumstances, should keep quiet and wait." Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge.

"My heart is withered," he exclaims, "I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and die in some land where men are less unjust." He wrote to the Great Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with the persecuted philosophers.