Why has Louis Racine treated Bayle like a dangerous man, with a cruel heart, in an epistle to Jean Baptiste Rousseau, which, although printed, is but little known?

He compares Bayle, whose logical acuteness detected the errors of opposing systems, to Marius sitting upon the ruins of Carthage:

Ainsi d’un ?il content Marius, dans sa fuite,

Contemplait les débris de Carthage détruite.

Thus exiled Marius, with contented gaze,

Thy ruins, Carthage, silently surveys.

Here is a simile which exhibits very little resemblance, or, as Pope says, a simile dissimilar. Marius had not destroyed reason and arguments, nor did he contentedly view its ruins, but, on the contrary, he was penetrated with an elevated sentiment of melancholy on contemplating the vicissitudes of human affairs, when he made the celebrated answer: “Say to the proconsul of Africa that thou hast seen Marius seated on the ruins of Carthage.”

We ask in what Marius resembled Bayle? Louis Racine, if he thinks fit, may apply the epithets “hardhearted” and “cruel” to Marius, to Sulla, to the triumvirs, but, in reference to Bayle the phrases “detestable pleasure,” “cruel heart,” “terrible man,” should not be put in a sentence written by Louis Racine against one who is only proved to have weighed the arguments of the Manich?ans, the Paulicians, the Arians, the Eutychians, against those of their adversaries. Louis Racine proportions not the punishment to the offence. He should remember that Bayle combated Spinoza, who was too much of a philosopher, and Jurieu, who was none at all. He should respect the good manners of Bayle and learn to reason from him. But he was a Jansenist, that is to say, he knew the words of the language of Jansenism and employed them at random. You may properly call cruel and terrible a powerful man who commands his slaves, on pain of death, to go and reap corn where he has sown thistles; ............