“It was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that ‘our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix. The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris … By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins.”