Nothing is new under the sun, but ...

Voltaire acts as a consultant detective in my new historical thriller, Death in Champagne, which has just received 5 stars during its launch on Amazon

I'm celebrating by recalling the sheer pleasure I derive from reading and translating Voltaire's correspondence, especially during the time when the Victor Constant Investigations are going forward. I'm always touched by the lifelong friendship he maintained between his grown-up self and the teachers he valued at the Jesuit college he attended in Paris as a boy. They equally loved engaging with him in all manner of debates about belief, scholarship, science, life, the universe and everything!

Here's an extract from a long letter that was mainly about literature, written to the Abbé d’Olivet on 18 October 1736.

I’m having fun writing poems again, besides studying Newton. At the moment I’m busy working out the weight of the sun. You may well ask, who cares what it weighs, as long as we can bask under it? Aha! It matters a great deal to fanciful minds like ours, because it involves the great principle of gravity. Dear friend, dear teacher, Newton is the greatest man who ever lived—yes, the greatest—so much so that alongside him, the giants of antiquity are like children playing with marbles.

Et omnes

Praecellit stellas exortus uti aethereus sol.

[Lucretius: As the heavenly sun, once risen, outshines the stars.]

Dicendum est Deus ille fuit, Deus.

[Lucretius: It must be said, he was a god, a god.]

However, let’s not be discouraged: let’s gather a few flowers upon this earth that he has measured and weighed, that he alone came to know. Let’s disport ourselves beneath the arms of that Atlas who holds up the sky, let’s go on writing plays and odes and scraps of poetry. Love me, comfort me in my littleness. Goodbye, dear friend, dear teacher.

The image is of course from NASA, amongst the most accurate photos ever taken of the sun's surface, in August this year. My thanks to NASA and also to Wayne Smith, the classicist friend who translated Voltaire's lines from Lucretius.