I Have Never Made But One

From a letter to his friend Étienne Noël Damilaville, dated May 16, 1767. Voltaire wrote it during one of his many campaigns against institutional religion — in this case during the aftermath of the Calas affair, in which a Protestant merchant had been unjustly broken on the wheel on the false accusation of murdering his son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. Voltaire spent three years successfully campaigning to have Calas rehabilitated posthumously. The prayer's irony is characteristic: rather than asking God for justice or mercy for victims, Voltaire asks only that his enemies expose themselves through their own absurdity.