"
Voltaire was furious; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote
letter after letter to Voltaire's friends in Prussia, and to the king
himself. The affair was growing daily more serious. Finally the city
authorities themselves, who doubtless felt that they were not playing a
very creditable part, put an end to it by ordering Freytag to release
his prisoner. Voltaire, set free, travelled leisurely towards France,
which, however, he found himself refused permission to enter. He
thereupon repaired to Geneva, and thereafter, freed from the patronage
of princes and the injustice of the powerful, spent his life in a land
where full freedom of thought and action was possible.
As for the worthy Freytag, he felicitated himself highly on the way he
had handled that dabbler in _poeshy_. "We would have risked our lives
rather than let him get away," he wrote; "and if I, holding a council of
war with myself, had not found him at the barrier but in the open
country, and he had refused to jog back, I don't know that I shouldn't
have lodged a bullet in his head.
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