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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAP. HI. The Secret, the Union and the Epoch of the Confpiracy. :N confpiracies it is not enough for the agents to have a particular watchword, or formula, in order to hide their general object, but they have alfo peculiar names, by which they mutually point out each other, and which are unintelligible to the public. They carefully conceal their correfpondence; but if they fear difcovery, it is then they ufe thefe precautions left their names, or the object of the plot, be expofed. Thefe means were not to be neglected by Voltaire or D'Alembert. In their correfpondence Frederick is of the con- olen called Dulnc, D'Alembert Protagoras, though fpirators. he often ftyles himfelf Bertrand.. Both were well applied to him, the former to denote the infidel, the latter to betoken the means of his impiety, by the drifts of Bertrand, in Fontaine's fable of the Monkey and the Cat: when D'Alembert is Bertrand (the monkey,) Voltaire is Raton§ (the cat.) Diderot perfonates Plato or Tomplat,|| and the general term for the confpi- rators, is Cactniat. They fay he is a good Cacouac, when he can be perfectly depended upon. Oftentimes, and particularly by Voltaire, they are called brothers Their fe- as in mafonarv' They alfo give peculiar imports to crct l?.:i- whole phrafes of their enigmatical language, for ex- guage. ample, the vine of Truth is well cultivated, is to fay we make amazing progrefs againft religion. This fecret language was particularly made ufe of, when they feared their letters were opened or flopped, which often gave Voltaire and D'Alembert great unea- finefs. It was for that,reafon, that many of their letters, were directed to fictitious perfons, to merchants or fome clerk in office, who was in the fecret. It does not Appear that they ever made ufe of cyphers, they ...