86 VOLTAIRE. 



against Voltaire. A profligate adventurer, called La 

 Beaumelle, who had been driven from Copenhagen, 

 where he was a popular preacher, who then came under 

 false colours to Berlin, who had indeed originally 

 committed a theft of Madame Maintenon's letters, and 

 printed them, was taken up by Maupertuis, and both 

 libelled Voltaire, pirated his works, and propagated 

 stories of his having slandered the king. Then came 

 a statement by Koenig, now professor in Holland, but 

 a member of the Berlin Academy, refuting Maupertuis' 

 favourite doctrine of the principle of least action, and 

 affirming, on the authority of letters from Leibnitz, 

 that it was no new discovery. In truth, Leibnitz had 

 refuted it, as he well might, for it rests upon an im- 

 perfect induction chiefly on the reflection of light, and 

 is at variance with many other phenomena, and even 

 with the reflected motion of all bodies except light, 

 inasmuch as no other body being perfectly elastic, the 

 reflected line never can be the shortest possible be- 

 tween the point of impact and any given plane. The 

 Courtier-President was enraged; he summoned his 

 academicians ; he had his case laid before them ; he 

 remained absent from the sitting, while an adherent- 

 proposed the expulsion of Koenig, on the ground of 

 his having forged the letters of Leibnitz, because the 

 death of the person from whom he had obtained the 

 copies prevented him from producing the originals. 

 Nothing can well be conceived more outrageous than 

 this proceeding on the part of a scientific body, all the 

 members of which were paid their salaries according 

 to the discretion of the President, and so were more 

 or less dependent upon him. But there was yet a lower 

 meanness behind. Maupertuis having caused Koenig's 



