The year 1749 was to prove a sombre one for Voltaire. His relationships with Mme Du Chatelet and Mme Denis were both in highly emotional and uncertain stages, culminating in Voltaire's utter devastation at the death of Mme Du Chatelet in September, and his ensuing need to lay the foundations of a new existence, initially in Paris and with his oldest friends. It is against this backdrop that one must envisage his literary activities in 1749. This year saw the highly successful comedy "Nanine" published, together with propaganda works arguing in favour of increasing the commodity and beauty of Paris, the capital from which he spent so much of his life an exile. At a time of crisis for Voltaire both in his personal relations and at court, he also wrote a the poem 'La vie de Paris et de Versailles' which acts as a love poem to Mme Denis as much as a satire on Parisian society.

Ce volume comprend plusieurs dialogues et autres textes courts que Voltaire ecrivit en 1750 et 1751, lors de ses derniers mois en France avant son depart pour la cour de l'empereur Frederic et pendant sa premiere annee a Berlin. Dialogues, reflexions philosophiques, ecrits historiques, poesies: Voltaire ne cesse de deployer, dans tous les genres et toutes les formes, le regard critique aiguise et l'humour mordant qui sont sa marque de fabrique, et qui ont tant seduit Frederic.

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science." Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality."