P.S.--In Vol. iv., p. 73., Madame du Châtelet's epitaph on Voltaire
contains an error, where _canis_ twice appears, but should be _carus_.
The lady's object was certainly complimentary, not sarcastic. My crampt
writing was of course the cause of the mistake, though, in the _opinion
of many_, the substituted word would not appear inapplicable to
Voltaire. A subjoined article of the same page, "Children at a Birth,"
reminds me of something analogous in Mercier's _Tableau de Paris_, where
reference is made to the _Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences_ for the
fact. The wife of a baker, it is there stated, in the short space of
seven years, produced one-and-twenty children, or three at each annual
birth; and, to prove that the prolific faculty was exclusively his, he
made a maid servant similarly the mother of three children at a birth.
The major portion, it appears, of this numerous progeny long survived.
Bayle, in his article of Tiraqueau, a French advocate of the sixteenth
century, quotes an epigram, which would make him the father of
forty-five children, and, it is added, by one wife. If so, several must
at least have been twins:
"Fæcundus facundus aquæ Tiraquellus amator,
Terquindecim librorum et liberum parens;
Qui nisi restinxisset aquis abstemius ignes,
Implesset orbem prole animi atque corporis."
The accomplished authoress of _A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic_
(1841, 2 volumes) was, it is well known, one of _four_ congenital
children in Norwich, where her father was an eminent physician.