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Jean Huber painted several scenes of me at Ferney — this one shows me dictating in bed, which was accurate. I wrote in bed. I wrote twenty thousand letters, over two thousand books and pamphlets, tragedies, histories, philosophical tales, and theological attacks. Jean Huber captured the atmosphere if not the precise moment: papers everywhere, a secretary attempting to keep pace, the permanent cup of coffee that I consumed at a rate my physicians considered alarming.

Ecrasons l'infâme — crush the infamy. The phrase appears at the end of hundreds of my letters. The infamy was not religion as such but religious intolerance: the execution of Jean Calas, accused of murdering his son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism, who was in fact innocent; the persecution of the Huguenots; the burning of books; the torture of heretics.

I was not an atheist. I believed in a God who created the universe and then left it alone. What I did not believe was that any priest or bishop had been authorised to speak on His behalf and burn people who disagreed.