To avoid Calvinist persecution, Voltaire moved across the border to Ferney, where the wealthy writer lived for 18 years until his death. Voltaire purchased a chateau in Geneva, where, among other works, he wrote Candide (1759). After the earthquake that leveled Lisbon in 1755, in which 15,000 people perished and another 15,000 were wounded, Voltaire wrote Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ( Poem on the Lisbon Disaster): 'But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?' Voltaire continued writing amusing but meaty philosophical plays and histories. In it the Deist candidly rejected immortality and questioned belief in God. In his memoirs, he wrote: 'I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind.' He dedicated Traite de metaphysique to her. He met the 27 year old married mother when he was 39. Voltaire wrote: 'The interest I have in believing a thing is not a proof of the existence of that thing.' Voltaire's French publisher was sent to the Bastille and Voltaire had to escape from Paris again, as judges sentenced the book to be 'torn and burned in the Palace.' Voltaire spent a calm 16 years with his deistic mistress, Madame du Chatelet, in Lorraine. The book also satirized the religious teachings of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal, including Pascal's famed 'wager' on God. There he wrote Lettres philosophiques (1733), which galvanized French reform. Upon a second imprisonment, in which Francois adopted the pen name Voltaire, he was released after agreeing to move to London.

He launched a lifelong, successful playwriting career in 1718, interrupted by imprisonment in the Bastille.

Jesuit-educated, he began writing clever verses by the age of 12. Quincy, Mass.In 1694, Age of Enlightenment leader Francois-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was born in Paris. John Adams Library copy transferred from the supervisors of the Temple and School Fund. Octave & le jeune Pompée, ou Le Triumvirat. John Adams Library copy incomplete: wanting vol. John Adams Library copy inscribed with pen trials on verso of front end papers, v. John Adams Library copy has bookplate: John Adams Library, in the Custody of the Boston Public Library 1, describes the 34 volumes of the edition

The 34 volume edition was published without volume numbers for the set as a whole Bibliothèque nationale, in describing its copy, used the volume numbers of its binder BN and Bengesco have only the 1783 reissue of the Théatre collation and contents of the 1773 edition vary from the 1783 reissue with the publication in six volumes of Questions sur l'Encyclopédie in 1777. edition of Voltaire's works published in Paris by Panckoucke in 1772-1773, later expanded to 40 v.

Sémiramis by Voltaire