The credible account is, it soon cracked asunder; and, after the conceivable sputterings, sparklings and flashings of various complexion, issued in lambent airs of "tacit mutual understanding; and in reading of AKAKIA together,--with peals of laughter from the King," as the common French Biographers assert.
"Readers know AKAKIA," [DIATRIBE DU DOCTEUR AKAKIA (in Voltaire,--OEuvres,--lxi.

19-62).] says Smelfungus: "it is one of the famous feats of Satirical Pyrotechny; only too pleasant to the corrupt Race of Adam! There is not much, or indeed anything, of true poetic humor in it: but there is a gayety of malice, a dexterity, felicity, inexhaustibility of laughing mockery and light banter, capable of driving a Perpetual President delirious.

What an Explosion of glass-crackers, fire-balls, flaming-serpents;--generally, of sleeping gunpowder, in its most artistic forms,--flaming out sky-high over all the Parish, on a sudden! The almost-sublime of Maupertuis, which exists in large quantities, here is a new artist who knows how to treat it.
The engineer of the Sublime (always painfully engineering thitherward without effect),--an engineer of the Comic steps in on him, blows him up with his own petards in a most unexampled manner.

Not an owlery has that poor Maupertuis, in the struggle to be sublime (often nearly successful, but never once quite), happened to drop from him, but Voltaire picks it up; manipulates it, reduces it to the sublimely ridiculous; lodges it, in the form of burning dust, about the head of MON PRESIDENT.

Needless to say of the Comic engineer that he is unfair, perversely exaggerative, reiterative, on the owleries of poor Maupertuis;--it is his function to BE all that.