Voltaire, while he appeared to
believe in God, never really believed in anything but the devil; since
his pretended deity is a malicious being, who, according to him, had
no pleasure but in evil. The glaring absurdity of this doctrine is
particularly disgusting from a man enjoying the greatest prosperity;
who, from the bosom of happiness, endeavors, by the frightful and
cruel image of all the calamities from which he is exempt, to reduce
his fellow creatures to despair. I, who had a better right than he
to calculate and weigh all the evils of human life, impartially
examined them, and proved to him that of all possible evils there
was not one to be attributed to Providence, and which had not its
source rather in the abusive use man made of his faculties than in
nature. I treated him, in this letter, with the greatest respect and
delicacy possible. Yet, knowing his self-love to be extremely
irritable, I did not send the letter immediately to himself, but to
Doctor Tronchin, his physician and friend, with full power either to
give it him or destroy it. Voltaire informed me in a few lines that
being ill, having likewise the care of a sick person, he postponed his
answer until some future day, and said not a word upon the subject.
Tronchin, when he sent me the letter, inclosed it in another, in which
he expressed but very little esteem for the person from whom he
received it.
I have never published, nor even shown, either of these two letters,
not liking to make a parade of such little triumphs; but the originals
are in my collections.
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