When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in 1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court at Versailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. It is no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that, “Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.” It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poet into a philosophe while in England. For one, these two sides of Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger a transformation in him.