An alternate version of Voltaire Foundation MS 15 (B). Besterman has incorrectly ordered the pages so p.2 should be read before p.1. Voltaire has included a second leaf, providing the text which forms lines 365-380 of chapter 38 (OCV, vol.13D). The reader therefore needs to read Wagnière’s text to the symbol, then read Voltaire’s addition, before returning to Wagnière’s text.

Voltaire writes that Quietism removed Cardinal de Bouillon from the court. He was the nephew of Turenne, to whom Voltaire notes that the king owed his salvation in the civil war. United by friendship with the Archbishop of Cambrai and charged with the king’s orders against him, he sought to reconcile his two duties and bring the two parties to conciliation. An Italian priest named Giori was a spy with the opposite faction and worked his way into Cardinal de Bouillon’s confidence, asking him for a thousand crowns which, after he had obtained them, he disappeared with. The letters between Giori and the Cardinal, Voltaire writes, were the Cardinal’s downfall at court, though he suggests that the Cardinal was punished wrongly. His letters show that he had conducted himself with wisdom and dignity, and that he had obeyed the orders of the king in condemning the mystics, whom Voltaire describes as the alchemists of religion. The king wrote a letter of reproach to Cardinal de Bouillon on 16th March 1699. After the rise of Telemachus in Europe, however, the Cardinal was recalled to court by the king but on the way he learned of the death of the Dean of the Sacred College in Rome and so instead took up the role instead. This embittered the king, who exiled the Cardinal for ten years. The Cardinal left France forever in 1710 at a time of great instability for Louis XIV and resigned from his position as the Grand Chaplain of France.

Voltaire begins by saying that an illustrious theologian from Basel has written that Lord Bolingbroke has the ‘chaude-pisse’, a popular term for gonorrhœa, and from there draws the conclusion that Moses is the author of the pentateuch. He remarks that Lord Chesterfield’s chaplain took up Lord Bolingbroke’s cause like a good Christian and defended it in a pious and modest letter, the translation of which arrived in Potsdam with the permission of the superiors. He adds that the King laughed a lot and so should Formey. He jokingly instructs Formey to live cheerfully on the gospel and philosophy, let the profane doubt the chronology of Moses and the monads, get covered in pitch-resin, put big pins in his ass, and follow the advice of the author of the newsletters. He continues, telling him to feel the centrifugal forces, or have himseld embalmed while still alive. Voltaire then writes that he intends to take a trip to the southern lands with Dalichamp and dissect the brains of twelve-foot-tall giants and men as hairy as bears with the tails of monkeys. He philosophises that ‘those who turn the foolishness of this world into mockery will always be the happiest’ and advises Formey to ‘put only their price on things, and don’t take large scales to weigh cobwebs.’ He then concludes by speaking of a song by the Archbishop of Cambrai that the Marquis de Fénélon recited to him at the Hague in front of his wife and the Abbé de la Ville.