His imagination was going wild.

"I went to him," says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his; "after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw it was.

Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into tears, 'Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!' was all he answered.

A few days afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied all the powers of malevolence." Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from the "home of society," as he had himself called Paris.

In vain he wrote to Diderot, "A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express what you pleased, but to preach openly against superstitions as disgraceful as they are sanguinary.