philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion
in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of
accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
religion but the code itself.

Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant