Autograph Letter Signed ("Vre"), 1 p, 4to, [Les Délices], October 28, [1758], to Elie Bertrand of Berne, with autograph integral address leaf and red wax seal, spotting and soiling to center of both leaves, creasing with mild separation at margins, loss at left margin from seal, toning.

Voltaire writes to one of the Swiss Calvinist ministers he befriended during his years outside of Geneva. Voltaire's relationship with the Calvinist community in and around Geneva was warm, but not without reserve at least on the part of the Swiss: they were reluctant to accept an openly irreligious writer into their midst, and he continually defied their local ordinances against the theater by staging productions of his works at his estate.
In part: "I read no newspaper either biased or unbiased and rarely the gazettes, which relate nonetheless that the Pyrrhus of the north has been entirely defeated. This news is more important than the new books on the spirit, on the Comédie de Genève and on the other comédie des pasteurs franco-suisses [reference unclear]. Madame de Bentinck, who believes herself to be a great Austrian because she is pleading at Vienna, is quite content with Bern and less so with the rest of your Switzerland. Personally I am content with everything and so content that I am in the process of buying the manor at Ferney...." Voltaire complains about the bureaucracy involved, wondering if he might just stay at Les Délices, and quotes—with shades of Candide—from a Horace Satire on the pleasures of home: "better than this have the gods done for me; I am content; nothing more do I ask."