denial; and saw himself, in spite of his high connections,
ruthlessly lodged in the Bastille in consequence. 'Let him sit,'
thought M. Arouet Senior, 'and come to his senses there!' He sat
for eighteen months (age still little above twenty); but privately
employed his time, not in repentance, or in serious legal studies,
but in writing a Poem on his Henri Quatre. 'Epic Poem,' no less;
LA LIGUE, as he then called it; which it was his hope the whole
world would one day fall in love with;--as it did. Nay, in two
years more, he had done a Play, OEDIPE the renowned name of it;
which ran for forty-eight nights' (18th November, 1718, the first
of them); and was enough to turn any head of such age. Law may be
considered hopeless, even by M. Arouet Senior.

"Try him in the Diplomatic line; break these bad habits and
connections, thought M. Arouet, at one time; and sent him to the
French Ambassador in Holland,--on good behavior, as it were, and
by way of temporary banishment. But neither did this answer.
On the contrary, the young fellow got into scrapes again; got into
amatory intrigues,--young lady visiting you in men's clothes,
young lady's mother inveigling, and I know not what;--so that the
Ambassador was glad to send him home again unmarried; marked, as
it were, 'Glass, with care!' And the young lady's mother printed
his Letters, not the least worth reading:--and the old M. Arouet
seems now to have flung up his head; to have settled some small
allowance on him, with peremptory no hope of more, and said,
'Go your own way, then, foolish junior: the elder shall be my
son.' M. Arouet disappears at this point, or nearly so, from the
history of his son Francois; and I think must have died in not
many years. Poor old M. Arouet closed his old eyes without the
least conception what a prodigious ever-memorable thing he had