Life of Voltaire #262849

Mémoires had been sponsors to Armand Arouet. A few years before the birth of his second son, M. Arouet sold the notaryship which he had purchased in early life, and some years later he obtained the well-paid and very responsible office of Receiver of Fees and Fines to the Chamber of Accounts (he is sometimes styled its treasurer), an important state department which exercised jurisdiction in all matters appertaining to the complex revenues of the Crown. Besides an official residence in town, he had a country house at Chatenay, a pretty rural suburb of Paris. Madame Arouet was a friend of the famous Ninon de l'enclos (another of her husband's distinguished clients), who, after having been made love to by three generations of Frenchmen, was in her old age the centre of a rather brilliant circle of free-thinking and free-and-easy persons of both sexes (many of them belonged to the aristocracy), forming a sort of social opposition to the then gloomy and priest-ridden court at Versailles. One of Ninon's most intimate allies, in her later and latest years, was a certain Abbé cle Chateauneuf, clever, agreeable, musical, who made some figure in Paris society, and whose brother, the Marquis (m.