The Correspondance Littéraire, an underground newsletter on the latest literary news and gossip in Paris, was written by Baron von Grimm and diffused throughout Europe. But Denis Diderot and Jacques-Henri Meister took over for him while he was in St. Petersburg, which covers the time this article appeared.

Diderot displayed emotions toward Voltaire, varying from hero-worship to envy to irritation, provoked by malicious tales he was at times too prompt to believe, the letters that passed between them were mostly cordial.1 Though often qualified as more radical than Voltaire, Diderot was in fact at first alarmed by Voltaire's pamphlet war and resisted his exhortations to join in.² This notice displays real grief, however, if not despair, alongside a ferocious indictment of the Archbishop of Paris for denying Voltaire burial. It was not yet known that the body had been secretly driven to Scellières, where its Abbé, Voltaire's nephew, buried him. The French Revolutionaries brought the body back in 1791 to re-inter him in the Pantheon with something close to a million people celebrating it over the course of its journey.

The fatal veil has fallen; the last rays of this divine clarity have just been extinguished, and the night that will follow this fine day will last perhaps for a long succession of centuries.

The greatest, most illustrious, perhaps, alas! the unique monument of this glorious era where all the talents, all the arts of the human mind seemed to have reached its highest degree of perfection; this superb monument has disappeared! Some unknown plot of earth has hidden its sad remains from our eyes.

He is no more, he who was both the Ariosto and the Virgil of France, he who brought back to life the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides for us; whose genius attained the heights of Corneille's thought, the sublime pathos of Racine, and, master of the empire these two rivals of the stage occupied, discovered yet another even worthier of his conquest in the great movements of nature, in the awful excesses of fanaticism, in the imposing contrasts between manners and opinions.

He is no more, he who, in his immense career, embraced the entire extent of all our knowledge and who left us masterpieces and models in nearly every genre; the first to make France aware of the philosophy of Newton, of the virtues of our best kings, and of the true value of liberty in commerce and in letters.

He is no more, he who, the first perhaps, wrote history as a philosopher, as a statesman, as a citizen, who relentlessly combated all the prejudices fatal to man's happiness and who, burying error and superstition beneath opprobrium and ridicule, was able to make himself equally heard by the ignorant and the wise; by the populace and by kings.

Fortified by the genius of the age that saw his birth, he alone maintained the declining age that saw him die; he alone delayed its fall. He is no more, and already ignorance and envy dare to insult his revered remains. He who deserved a temple and altars is refused the repose of a tomb, the simple honors that are not refused even the lowliest of mankind.

Fanaticism, whose startled spirit trembled before that of a great man, scarcely sees him expiring before it already flatters itself of recapturing its empire, and the first effort of its impotent rage is an excess of dementia and cowardice.

What do you hope from such barbarity? What will you teach the universe in exerting your fury and vengeance upon these mortal remains, if only the terror and fright with which he inspired you until the last moment of his life? Here then is what your power is today! A single man, with no other support than the ascendancy of talents and glory, resisted your persecutions for sixty years, braved your furies for sixty years, and death alone delivered your victim to you, a vain shadow, insensitive to your insults, but whose name alone is still the love of mankind and the terror of its tyrants.

What was your design in refusing a simple tomb to him upon whom the nation had just conferred the honors of a public triumph? Were you afraid that this tomb might become an altar, and the place that enclosed it a temple? Were you afraid to see a man who had had raised himself above all ranks by the brilliance and superiority of his genius confounded with the common lot? Did you think it was so much in your interest to announce to all of Europe that the greatest man of his age died as he had lived, without weakness or prejudice?

In wishing to hide in the deepest obscurity, had it been possible, the place where the remains of Voltaire lie, in seeking to shroud the moment of his death in darkness and mystery, did you not tremble lest the most ardent of his disciples not take advantage of such favorable circumstances to establish the proof of his immortality and resurrection? Ah! You knew all too well that, had they tried, the works of his that remain to us would not allow belief in miracles of this species.

Weak and cowardly enemies of the shadow of a great man! By tormenting all the powers of heaven and earth in order to rob him of the honors due him, what benefit do you expect from such vain efforts? Will you erase him from the memory of men? Will you annihilate this multitude of masterpieces, eternal monuments to his glory, consecrated in every part of the world for the instruction and admiration of future races? Is it by a few puerile prohibitions, by a few impotent anathemas that you think you will enchain these torrents of light, spread from one end of the universe to the other?

…Public opinion, the homage of all his talents from all the most distinguished men of all nations, and the trust and friendship of several sovereigns, had erected for him a sort of tribunal superior in some ways to all the tribunals of the world, since reason and humanity alone had dictated its laws, and genius had pronounced its decisions. It was at this respectable tribunal that we had seen the thunderbolts of injustice, slander and superstition vanish more than once. It was there that the innocence of the Calas, the Sirvens, and the de La Barres were avenged. The imminent hope of re-establishing the unfortunate Count de Lally's reputation was the center of his last endeavors; it was the last success over which his nearly extinguished life seemed to light up once again. Shortly before its end, plunged into a sort of lethargy, he emerged a few moments when he was told about the final judgment of this affair, and the last lines that he dictated were addressed to the son of this illustrious, unfortunate man. They were: “The moribund resuscitates in learning this great news. He embraces M. de Lally tenderly. He sees that the king is the defender of justice. He will die content.” That was, so to speak, the last sigh of this famous man.