FERNEY
Ferney, as has been said, stood on the north shore of Lake Leman, in the
district of Gex, three and a half miles from Geneva and almost joining
Délices. The village to which it belonged, also called Ferney, was
really nothing but a mean hamlet with forty or fifty miserable
inhabitants, “devoured by poverty, scurvy, and tax-gatherers.” A very
ugly little church stood much too near the house.
That house, when Voltaire bought it, was very old, tumbledown, and
totally inadequate to his requirements. The entrance was through two
towers connected by a drawbridge. If it was picturesque, it was
certainly not comfortable. When Voltaire had rebuilt it, it was
certainly comfortable, and decidedly unpicturesque.
He had begun that rebuilding three months before the deed of purchase
was signed. By December 6, 1758, he had twenty masons at work. By the
24th, what he might well have cynically called his _optimism_ led him to
think it “a pretty house enough.” By June, 1759, it was “a charming
château in the Italian style.”
By July it was “of the Doric order. It will last a thousand years.”
By November it was “a piece of architecture which would have admirers
even in Italy.” While by the March of 1761 it had grown--at any rate in
its master’s fancy--into “a superb château.”
There have not been wanting to Voltaire enemies to argue persistently
and vociferously that Ferney was not at all what he represented it; and
that all his geese were swans. They were. Ferney at its best and
completest was never anything but a plain, sensible, commodious country
house. It had neither wings nor decoration; not any architectural merit,
except that its ugliness was simple and not elaborate. Voltaire was his
own architect; and owned quite frankly that he knew nothing at all about
architecture. The man who had travelled through Holland, Belgium, and
Prussia without once stepping out of his post-chaise to look at a famous
picture, or an immortal sculpture, or the “frozen music” of a grand
cathedral, had as little feeling for art as for Nature.
He thought Ferney a superb château because it was _his_ château. Just as
he was devoted to flowers and gardens, when they were _his_ flowers and
_his_ gardens.
It is certainly not the best way of loving art or Nature, but it is the
only way of many persons besides Voltaire. And, after all, that
comfortable feeling of landed proprietorship, that honest pride in his
cows and his sheep, his bees and his silkworms, sits pleasantly enough
on this withered cynic of sixty-five; and makes him at once more human,
more sympathetic--the same flesh and blood as the simple and ordinary.
He had, as he said, plenty of wood and stone for his building operations
on the premises--“oak enough to be useful to our navy, if we had one”;
and stone, which the architect thought very good, and which turned out
to be very bad. He said gaily that when the house was finished he should
write on the wall “Voltaire fecit”; and that posterity would take him
for a famous architect. As for that marble of which he had talked
largely as being brought up by the lake, the man who declared that he
preferred a good English book to a hundred thousand pillars of it, did
not trouble to obtain much or to make an elaborate use of what he did
obtain. He wanted the house “agreeable and useful,” and he had it. There
was a fine view from it; though not so fine as it might have been, for
it faced the high road. Still, as its happy master said, it was situated
in the most smiling country in Europe; at its feet the lake gleamed and
sparkled; and beyond the warm and gorgeous luxuriance of its perfect
gardens could be seen, in dazzling contrast, the eternal snows of Mont
Blanc.
When the rebuilding was finished the house was, looked at without
prejudice, the well-appointed home of a well-to-do _bourgeois
gentilhomme_--with an unusual love for literature. There was an ordinary
hall with a stone staircase on the left which led up to the fourteen
guest-rooms, all comfortably furnished, said one of those guests, who
was an Englishman and had been used to solid English comfort at home.
Here and there were some good pictures--or copies of good
pictures--copies, most likely, since Voltaire, hardly knowing the
difference, would be apt to reflect that a copy would do as well as an
original, and be much cheaper. A Venus after Paul Veronese and a Flora
after Guido Reni, some of the visitors declared genuine; and some as
hotly pronounced spurious. Wagnière, that Genevan boy who lived to write
memoirs like the other secretaries, stated that his master had about
twenty valuable pictures in all; and some good busts. There were various
family portraits about the house: one of Madame Denis; one of Voltaire’s
young mother; and, soon, a likeness of Madame de Pompadour painted by
herself, and by herself given to Voltaire. In Madame Denis’s room
presently there was a portrait of Catherine, Empress of Russia,
embroidered in silk; and a marble statue of Voltaire. There was a copy
of this statue, or his bust in plaster, in almost every room in the
house.
The library was simple, and, for Voltaire, small. Dr. Burney, the father
of Fanny, who saw it in 1770, describes it as “not very large but well
filled,” and says it contained “a whole-length figure in marble” of its
master “recumbent, in one of the windows.” At Voltaire’s death it
contained only 6,210 volumes. But almost every one had on its margin
copious notes in that fine, neat little handwriting. Six thousand
volumes annotated by a Voltaire! His sarcasm should have made the
dullest ones amusing; and his relentless logic the obscurest ones clear.
There were a great many volumes of history and theology; dictionaries in
every language; all the Italian poets; and all the English philosophers.
The Comte de Maistre, who saw this library after Voltaire’s death when
it had been bought by Catherine the Great, wondered at the “extreme
mediocrity” of the books. By this he explained himself to mean that
there were no rare old editions and no sumptuous bindings, which the
Count took as a sign that Voltaire was “a stranger to all profound
literature.” It was a sign that Voltaire read to act; that books were
his tools, not his ornaments; that he loved literature, not as a
sensuous delight, but as the lever that was to turn the world. “A few
books, very much marked.” That library was infinitely characteristic of
the man who was doer, not dreamer; of the mind to which every poet,
every philosopher, every scientist acted as a spur to new practical
effort; of the man who was to go down the ages not as playwright, or
verse-maker, but as he who “conquered the intellect of France, for the
Revolution.”
The _salle à manger_ was distinguished only by a most extraordinary and
very bad allegorical picture, called “The Temple of Memory,” in which a
Glory, with her hair dressed much _à la mode_, was presenting Voltaire
(who was surrounded with a halo like a saint) to the God of Poetry who
was getting out of his chariot with a crown in his hand. On one side of
the picture appeared busts of Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, Corneille,
and other great men; on the opposite side were caricatures of Fréron and
Desfontaines, who were being most satisfactorily kicked by Furies.
Voltaire laughed at, and enjoyed immensely, this part of the picture
while he was at meals. The artist was Alix, a native of Ferney, and soon
an _habitué_ at the château. It was fortunate for him that Voltaire was
so much better a friend than he was a judge of art.
His bedroom and salon were both small rooms. The salon, entered by
folding doors, contained the master’s bust above the stove, six or seven
pictures, “more or less good,” a portrait of Madame du Châtelet, and
casts of Newton and Locke. One of the pictures, after Boucher,
represented a hunting scene. There were ten tapestry armchairs, and a
table of very common varnished marble. French windows and a glass door
led into the garden.
Voltaire’s bedroom was principally distinguished by a neatness,
cleanness, and simplicity natural to him, but very unusual in his day.
The roughly carved deal bedstead one visitor regretfully regarded as
“almost mean.” It was the fashion then to spend the night in what looked
like a large heavily curtained coffin. Voltaire--to the melancholy
vexation of the fashionable--seems to have dispensed with most of the
curtains, but could not escape a huge baldachino over his head. Inside
it, hung a very bad pastel portrait of Lekain; and a candelabra
containing three wax candles, so that he could see to read. On either
side of the bed hung portraits of Frederick the Great, of Voltaire
himself, and of Madame du Châtelet. Placed between the door and the only
window were five or six other engraved portraits, all in very simple
black frames. The bed hangings and the four armchairs were upholstered
alike in pale blue damask.
The room contained five desks. On each were notes for the various
subjects on which the author was working: this desk had notes for a
play; this, for a treatise on philosophy; a third for a _brochure_ on
science; and so on. All were exquisitely neat and orderly; every paper
in its right place. The writing chair was of cane, with a cover on it to
match the bed curtains. Later on, Voltaire had a second writing-chair
made, which he used much in the last few years of his life: one of its
arms formed a desk, and the other a little table with drawers; and both
were revolving.
Just below the master’s bedroom was Wagnière’s, so that if Voltaire
knocked on the floor during the night the servant could hear him. That
he did so knock, pretty often, rests on the rueful testimony of Wagnière
himself.
Quite close to the house stood a little marble bathroom with hot and
cold water laid on. It was a very unusual luxury in those times, and
considered a highly unnecessary one. It is pleasant to a century much
more particular in such matters than the eighteenth to reflect that
Voltaire was always personally cleanly and tidy to an extent which his
contemporaries considered ridiculous. That fine and dirty age could
hardly forgive his insisting on his ancient perukes and queer old
gardening clothes being kept as trim and well brushed as if they were
new and grand. His passion for soap and water was one of the complaints
his enemies in Prussia had brought against him. Wagnière records that
his master was “scrupulously clean” and also his love of washing his
eyes in pure cold water. Doubtless the habit preserved them, in spite of
the inordinate amount of work they had to do. To the day of his death
they never needed spectacles.
Most of the visitors comment on the well-kept appearance of the house;
though one, Lady Craven, Margravine of Anspach, said the _salle à
manger_ was generally dirty and the servants’ liveries soiled. It was at
Ferney as it had been at Cirey. The master was particular, but the
mistress was not. If Madame du Châtelet had been engrossed with science,
Madame Denis was engrossed with amusement. Her extravagance and bad
household management in that respect were often the cause of
disagreements between her uncle and herself. And, that “fat pig, who
says it is too hot to write a letter,” as Voltaire once described his
niece to Madame d’Épinay, was the sort of person who thought no trouble
too great for pleasure, but any trouble too great for duty.
It is significant that when she went to Paris in 1768 her uncle seized
the opportunity of having Ferney thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom.
It is said that when he caught sight of cobwebs by the pillars and
porticoes of the house, which the servants had neglected to remove, he
used to vigorously flick a whip, crying out, “À la chasse! à la chasse!”
and the whole household, including the guests, had to join in the spider
hunt.
He had in his daily employ sixty or seventy persons, and sometimes more.
Five servants usually waited at table, of whom three were in livery.
Martin Sherlock, the Englishman, says that the dinner consisted of two
courses and was eaten off silver plates with the host’s coat of arms on
them; while at the dessert the spoons, forks, and blades of the knives
were of silver-gilt; and adds that no strange servant was ever allowed
to officiate at meals. Wagnière records how two of the household having
robbed their master, the police got wind of the matter; and Voltaire
bade him go and warn the delinquents to fly immediately, “for if they
are arrested I shall not be able to save them from hanging.” He also
sent them some money for the journey. It is pleasant to learn that the
hearts of the culprits were touched by this generous kindness, and that,
having escaped, they lived honest lives.
It was a rule at Ferney that all peasants who came to the house should
have a good dinner and twenty-four sous given them before they pursued
their way.
“Good to all about him,” was the Prince de Ligne’s description of
Voltaire. It was not an extravagant one.
If the house at Ferney was simple and comfortable rather than
magnificent, the grounds were on a far more elaborate scale. There was
enough land to grow wheat, hay, and straw. There were poultry yards and
sheepfolds; an orchard watered by a stream; meadows, storehouses, and an
immense barn which stabled fifty cows with their calves and served as a
granary, and of which its master was intensely proud.
Then, too, there were farms which Voltaire managed himself, and so made
lucrative. He was pleased to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he
also did everything in the garden--the gardener was “_si bête_.” That he
had a field which was always called Voltaire’s field, because he
cultivated it entirely with his own hands, is certainly true. Before
long he had four or five hundred beehives; turkeys and silkworms; and a
breeding stable for horses, transferred from the Délices. He was not a
little delighted when, in this May of 1759, the Marquis de Voyer,
steward of King Louis’s stables, made him a present of a fine stallion.
As if he had not hobbies enough, he soon became an enthusiastic
tree-planter--begging all his friends to follow his example--and sending
waggons all the way to Lyons for loads of young trees for his park.
After a while that park stretched in three miles of circuit round the
house, and included a splendid avenue of oaks, lindens, and poplars. In
the garden were sunny walls for peaches; vines, lawns, and flowers. It
was laid out with a charming _imprévu_ and irregularity, most
unfashionable in that formal day. Voltaire had always a “tender
recollection of the banks of the Thames,” and made his garden as English
as he could. It is indeed melancholy to note that artificial water and
prim terraces were soon introduced to spoil--though their master
thought they improved--its luxuriant irregularity; and that objects like
lightning conductors, and fountains presided over by plaster nymphs,
were not considered the least out of keeping with Nature by their lord
and master. Near his silkworm house a thick linden-tree with overhanging
branches formed what was called Voltaire’s study, and there he wrote
verses “for recreation.” Nature certainly never inspired any of _them_.
Now and again there came, it is true, even to this most typical son of
the most artificial of all centuries, as he cultivated his field, or
pruned and weeded in his garden, such reflections as might have fallen
from the lips of his great opposite, Rousseau: “I have only done one
sensible thing in my life--to cultivate the ground. He who clears a
field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers in
Europe.”
“You have done a great work for posterity” a friend said to him one day.
“Yes, Madame. I have planted four thousand feet of trees in my park.”
No more incongruous picture could be painted than that of this
“withering cynic,” this world-famous hewer, hacker, and uprooter in his
old grey shoes and stockings, a long vest to his knees, little black
velvet cap and great drooping peruke, tranquilly directing, cultivating,
sowing, “planting walnut and chestnut trees upon which I shall never see
walnuts or chestnuts,” consoling himself for the toads in his garden by
the reflection that “they do not prevent the nightingales from singing”:
and prophesying that his destiny would be “to end between a seedlip,
cows, and Genevans.”
For the time this country life was his element not the less. He wrote
that it was, to Madame du Deffand, a dozen times. True, he had taken to
it late. But perhaps always, deep down in him, undeveloped, stifled by
Paris and by the burning needs of humanity, had been the peaceful
primæval tastes. Cirey had roused them. Délices had nourished them: and
Ferney and Tourney confirmed them.
Tourney had given its master a title, but at first it gave him nothing
else. It was a county _pour rire_, “the land in a bad state,” “a garden
where there was nothing but snails and moles, vines without grapes,
fields without corn, and sheds without cows,” and “a house in ruins.”
Still, the land could be made fertile; and the house, if it _was_ in
ruins, boasted an admirable view, and was but “a quarter of a league”
from Geneva.
By February, 1759, fifty workmen were putting it to rights; and by
November the Count of Tourney could say that he had planted hundreds of
trees in the garden, and used more powder (in rock-blasting) than at the
siege of a town. Everything needed repairing, he added--fields, roads
granaries, wine-presses--and everything was being repaired.
As at Ferney and Délices, the master personally supervised every detail;
and so made his farms, his nurseries, his bees, his silkworms, all pay.
In the house at Tourney he quickly made a theatre-room. If some of the
guests were disposed to laugh at a stage which held nine persons in a
semicircle with difficulty, and to think the green and gold decorations
tawdry, Voltaire adored that “theatre of Punchinello” as a child adores
a new toy. “A little green and gold theatre,” “the prettiest and
smallest possible”--he alludes to it in his letters a hundred times.
From the September of 1760 he was anxious to transfer it to Ferney. But
meanwhile he loved it where and as it was. Tourney also was useful to
provide accommodation for the servants of the innumerable guests who
came to stay at Ferney.
No idea of Voltaire’s life there could be given without mention of that
incessant stream of visitors of all nations and languages which flowed
through it, almost without pause for twenty years. Half the genius--and
but too many of the fools--of Europe came to worship at the shrine of
the prophet of this literary Mecca.
As prim Geneva shut its gates at nightfall, every one who came to sup
with M. de Voltaire had to stay all night in his house. Ferney had no
inn. After fourteen years of his life there, Voltaire might well say
that he had been the hotel-keeper of Europe. He told Madame du Deffand,
as early as 1763, that he had entertained four hundred English people,
of whom not one ever after gave him a thought.
Too many of his guests, indeed, were not merely self-invited: but
remained at Ferney with such persistency that their unhappy host would
sometimes retire to bed and say he was dying, to get rid of them. One
caller, who had received a message to this effect, returned the next
day. “Tell him I am dying again. And if he comes any more, say I am dead
and buried.”
Another visitor, when told Voltaire was ill, shrewdly replied that he
was a doctor and should like to feel his pulse. When Voltaire sent down
a message to say he was dead, the visitor replied, “Then I will bury
him. In my profession I am used to burying people.” His humour appealed
to Voltaire’s. He was admitted. “You seem to take me for some curious
animal,” said Voltaire.
“Yes, Monsieur, for the Phœnix.”
“Very well: the charge to see me is twelve sous.”
“Here are twenty-four,” said the visitor. “I will come again to-morrow.”
He did, and on many to-morrows: and was received as a friend.
But all the importunate were not so clever, and their fulsome flattery
was odious to the man who loved it daintily dressed.
“Sir, when I see you, I see the great candle that lights the world.”
“Quick, Madame Denis,” cried Voltaire. “A pair of snuffers!”
One persistent woman tried to effect an entry by saying that she was the
niece of Terrai, the last, and not the least corrupt, of Louis XV.’s
finance ministers.
Voltaire sent out a message. “Tell her I have only one tooth left, and I
am keeping that for her uncle.”
The Abbé Coyer, on his arrival, calmly announced that he was going to
stay six weeks.
“In what respect, my dear Abbé, are you unlike ‘Don Quixote’? He took
the inns for châteaux, and you take the châteaux for inns.”
Coyer left early the next day.
Still, in spite of such rebuffs, the visitors were incessant.
One said that he could not recollect there being _more_ than sixty to
eighty people at supper after theatricals. Voltaire himself said there
were constantly fifty to a hundred.
Many visitors stayed for weeks; many for months; some for years.
Madame de Fontaine, with her lover _en train_, could come when she
chose--and she often chose. Mignot came when _he_ liked. Great-nephew
d’Hornoy was a constant visitor.
At different times there were two adopted daughters and two Jesuit
priests living in the house. One relative, as will be seen, was at
Ferney for a decade--completely paralysed. And hanging about the house
were generally a trio or a quartette of gentlemen ne’er-do-weels, who
sometimes copied their host’s manuscripts, and sometimes stole them.
In the midst of such a household Voltaire pursued his way and his life’s
work, wonderfully methodically and equably. It was his custom to stay in
bed till eleven o’clock, or later. There he read or wrote; or dictated
to his secretaries with a distressing rapidity. Sometimes he was reading
to himself at the same time. About eleven, a few of his guests would
come up and pay him a brief visit.
The rest of the morning he spent in the gardens and farms,
superintending and giving orders. In earlier years, he dined with his
house party--in an undress, for which he always apologised and which he
never changed. Later on, he always dined alone. After dinner he would go
into the salon and talk for a little with his guests. The whole of the
rest of the afternoon and evening until supper-time he spent in study:
in which he never allowed himself to be interrupted. One at least of his
guests complained that his only fault was to be “_fort renfermé_.”
At supper he appeared in as lively spirits as a schoolboy set free from
school. It was the time for recreation: and a well earned recreation
too. He led his guests to talk on such subjects as pleased them. When a
discussion grew serious, he would listen without saying a word, with his
head bent forward. Then, when his friends had adduced their arguments,
he advanced his own, in perfect order and clearness, and yet with an
extraordinary force and vehemence. He was seldom his best before a large
company, especially of the kind that had come, as he said, “to see the
rhinoceros.” But with a few kindred spirits he was as brilliant as he
had been twenty years before over the supper-table at Cirey. At Ferney
he must have missed indeed that woman who, having flung off her mantle
of science and erudition, became socially what socially all women should
be--an inspirer, a sympathiser, a magnet to draw out men’s wit--a
sorceress who talked so well that she made her companions feel not how
clever she was, but how clever they were.
Niece Denis was certainly the most good-natured of hostesses--if she was
_gaupe_, as Madame du Deffand said--and was grateful to her uncle’s
guests for mitigating the ennui of a country life. She was useful too.
When Voltaire was tired or bored, he could retire directly after supper
to that invariable refuge, bed; and leave his niece to act with his
visitors. When he was not bored and there were no theatricals, he
sometimes read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle” as in old times; or quoted
poetry--any but his own--which he never could recollect; or talked
theatres or played chess. It was the only game in which he indulged, and
he was a little ashamed of it. Games are so idle!
When he went to bed he started work afresh. It was his only
intemperance. If he kept an abundant table for his guests he was still
infinitely frugal himself. His _déjeuner_ consisted only of coffee, with
cream; his supper, of eggs, although there was always a chicken ready
for him in case he fancied it. He drank a little burgundy, and owned to
a weakness for lentils. Of coffee, in which he had indulged freely in
youth, he now took only a few cups a day. He had a habit of ignoring
meals altogether when he was busy--a little idiosyncrasy somewhat trying
to his secretaries. Wagnière also complained that his master was too
sparing in sleep; and called him up from that room below, several times
in the night, to assist him in his literary work. When he had a play on
hand he was “in a fever.”
Many of the visitors who stayed at Ferney have left an account of their
life there. Though the accounts always graphically portray the character
of the writers, they sketch much less vividly the portrait of Voltaire.
But from such accounts--all taken together, and corrected by each other
from Voltaire’s own descriptions, from Wagnière’s and from Madame
Denis’s--Ferney, and the life there, were as nearly as possible what has
been depicted. Changes in habits are inevitable in twenty years.
Differing accounts may all be true--at different times. Feverishly busy
for Voltaire, idle and sociable for Madame Denis; she carried along by
that unceasing stream of guests, and he watching it, half amused and
half bored, from his own firm mooring of a great life’s work--that was
Ferney for its master and mistress from 1758 until 1778. They did not
regularly take up their abode there until 1760. They did not give up
Délices altogether until 1765. But from the autumn of 1758 Ferney was
their real home, the home of Voltaire’s heart; inextricably associated
with him by his friends and his enemies; the subject of a thousand
scandals, and of most beautiful imaginative descriptions. Nearly all
great men have had one place dedicated to them--Florence to Dante;
Corsica to Napoleon; Stratford to Shakespeare; Weimar to Goethe; and
Ferney to Voltaire.