Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/326

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294
The Man of Forty Crowns.

thousand two hundred and fifty livres by it. Besides, some respect is owing to a crowned head. He should not be lightly damned.

The party opposed to these good people pretended, on the contrary, that no compounding for salvation ought to be allowed to Marcus Antoninus; that he was a heretic; that the Carpocratians and the Alogi were not so bad as he; that he had died without confession; that it was necessary to make an example; that it was right to damn him, if but to teach better manners to the emperors of China and Japan—to those of Persia, Turkey, and Morocco—to the kings of England, Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia—to the stadtholder of Holland—to the avoyers of the Canton at Berne, who no more go to confession than did the Emperor Marcus Antoninus; that, in short, there is an unspeakable pleasure in passing sentence against a dead sovereign, which one could not fulminate against him in his lifetime, for fear of losing one's ears.

This quarrel became as furious as was formerly that of the Ursulines and the Annonciades. . . . In short, it was feared that it would come to a schism, as in the time of the hundred and one Mother Goose's tales, and of certain bills payable to the bearer in the other world. To be sure, a schism is something very terrible. The meaning of the word is a division in opinion, and till this fatal moment all men had been agreed to think the same thing.

Mr. Andrew, who was an excellent member of so-