Voltaire - Men of Letters: Let Them Perish

The World AS it Is

viii



Returning home, he sent for some new books to allay his despondency, and invited some men of letters to dinner to restore his spirits.  Twice as many came as were invited, like wasps attracted by honey.  These parasites were avid for food and talk; they praised two kinds of person, the dead and themselves, but never their contemporaries, with the exception of their host.  If one of their number made a witty remark the others lowered their eyes and bit their lips in chagrin for not having thought of it themselves.  They dissimulated less than the mages, because the objects of their ambition were so much smaller.  Each of them coveted the post of secretary in a great house and the reputation of being a great man; they traded insults openly, which they believed to be shafts of wit.  They had heard something of Babouc's mission [deciding whether the city and its inhabitants should be spared in war].  One of them privately begged him to exterminate a rival who had not sufficiently praised him five years earlier; another asked him to get rid of a citizen who had never laughed at his comedies; a third asked for the abolition of the Academy because he had never been able to get himself elected to it.  When the meal was over each of them left separately, because in the entire tribe there were not two men who could endure or even speak to each other except at the tables of the rich.  Babouc concluded that there would be no great harm if all this vermin perished in the general conflagration.



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