VOLTAIRE AND GENEVA: VOLTAIRE AND LA HARPE
Now Voltaire was not only genius and philanthropist, he was also a
country gentleman.
He played the part to the life. He amicably exchanged seeds and bulbs
with his neighbours, and admired their gardens in return for their
admiration of his; he invited them to dinner-parties and theatricals;
and, like many another of his class, could not for the life of him help
interfering in local politics.
Geneva was a republic. But its constitution was not to modern ideas--or
to Voltaire’s ideas--at all republican.
In the governing class, which consisted of the Great Council of Two
Hundred, the Little Council of Twenty-Five, and the Consistory of the
Clergy, the people were not represented at all.
These people were divided into the shopkeepers, or Bourgeoisie, who
demanded a share of political power; and the journeymen mechanics, who
were not only without any political rights, but could not even set up in
business for themselves, occupy any official post, or go into the
liberal professions. These (so-called) Natives, a very large class, were
the descendants of foreigners who had settled in Geneva. They asked for
the rights enjoyed by the Bourgeoisie; while the Bourgeoisie, scornfully
refusing the demands of the Natives, themselves asked for some of the
privileges enjoyed by the Councils.
Voltaire, now as ever, was on the side not of the governing class, but
of the people who had a right to share in the government, but did not;
and, now as ever, he was irresistibly tempted to interfere in what was
not his business.
In the autumn of 1765, “in spite of Espinas, Calas, and Sirven, who
surround me; of wheels, gallows, galleys, and confiscations; and of
Chevaliers de la Barre who do not precisely pour balm in the blood,” he
began to take upon himself the highly unnecessary and stormy _rôle_ of
peacemaker between the Genevan Bourgeoisie and Magistracy.
He first tried to get up some mediatory dinner-parties at Ferney, at
which the heads of these two parties were to meet and amicably discuss
their differences! The Council of Twenty-Five responded with a chilly
dignity that it was very much obliged to M. de Voltaire, but it was not
going to settle political disputes in _that_ way; while four of the
Bourgeoisie joyfully accepted so pleasant an invitation, and arrived at
Ferney in M. de Voltaire’s carriage, graciously sent for their
convenience.
These four guests showed such a sweet reasonableness on all topics under
discussion, that, says Voltaire, writing to that haughty Council, there
is surely hope of a reconciliation?
The Council, in response, will be obliged if the Lord of Ferney will
consider the matter closed.
Not he.
At the request of the Bourgeoisie he drew up a document stating their
claims, sent it to France and begged her to step in and settle the
dispute.
She selected as mediator her new envoy at Geneva, M. Hennin, who arrived
on December 16, 1765, whose mediation did not prosper at all, but who
was, and remained, much Voltaire’s friend.
By this time the Bourgeoisie had become not a little aggressive and
dictatorial, and the long mediatory dinner-parties had begun to bore
Voltaire.
After all, the most oppressed class were the Natives. Two of them called
at Ferney, and presently brought its lord a written statement of their
grievances against the Bourgeoisie, which were not few or slight. He
promised help, entered into the smallest details, and dismissed them
with memorable words: “You are the largest part of a free and
industrious people, and you are in slavery.... If you are forced to
leave a country which your labours make prosperous, I shall still be
able to help and protect you.”
He wrote a little introductory letter to that statement which the
Natives purposed to present to M. de Beauteville, the new mediator sent
by France, to succeed, if that might be, where Hennin had failed.
“What is the Third Estate?” said the Abbé Sieyès. “Nothing.” “What ought
it to be? Everything.”
In 1766 it was nothing. In the eye of the law, said de Beauteville, it
positively did not exist.
He dismissed the petition with contumacy, and sent the Natives to the
Councils, who received them in the same way.
Then M. de Voltaire himself wrote a petition for them; but before they
sent it to the mediators (three had now been appointed, one by France,
one by Berne, one by Geneva), he warned them of their probable failure,
in a prophecy which Geneva long remembered. “You are like little
flying-fish. Out of the water, you are eaten by birds of prey; in it, by
larger fish. You are between two equally powerful parties: you will fall
victims to the interests of one or the other, or perhaps of both
together.”
When the petition was presented on April 28, 1766, the unlucky Natives
were threatened with imprisonment if they did not reveal its authorship.
They did. Notwithstanding, a few days later, Auzière, their leader, was
thrown into prison, a result Voltaire had long foreseen. Here the affair
ended, for a time at least. Voltaire summed up his own position, with
his usual neatness, in writing to d’Argental on May 6th. “The Natives
say that I take the part of the Bourgeois, and the Bourgeois that I take
the part of the Natives. The Natives and Bourgeois both pretend I pay
too much deference to the Councils, and the Councils say I am too
friendly to both the Bourgeois and Natives.”
The Councils, in point of fact, were exceedingly angry with Voltaire, to
whom happened precisely what happens to the foolish person who separates
fighting dogs. The dogs growl at him and begin fighting again, and their
master considers his interference uncommonly impertinent.
The air of Geneva was sultry with storms in this season of 1766; or
Voltaire had upon him one of those pugnacious moods in which he had rent
limb from limb Pompignan, Fréron, Desfontaines. To be sure, he seldom
gave the first blow; but the moment he saw a chance of a fight he was as
agog to join in it at seventy-two as he had been at twenty-two.
The Protestant minister called Jacob Vernet was the unlucky person who
offended him now. Vernet was clever, and himself a writer. He had been
friendly with Voltaire until 1757, when he sharply criticised the “Essay
on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” Then they further fell out on that
vexed topic, a theatre in Geneva; and when d’Alembert’s famous article
appeared in the “Encyclopædia,” Vernet broke off all intercourse with
Voltaire, telling him the reason. Then Vernet drew a portrait of
Voltaire in his “Critical Letters of an English Traveller.” The likeness
was not sufficiently flattering to please the original, who thereupon
attacked Vernet in a “Dialogue between a Priest and a Protestant
Minister.” Vernet complained to the Councils that he had been libelled.
And in May, 1766, Voltaire wrote against Vernet one of the most virulent
of personal satires which ever fell from his pen--“The Praise of
Hypocrisy.” It lent his hand cunning for that kind of work. His next was
the famous poem entitled “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The excuse for this savage personal polemic was the case of one Covelle,
who in 1763 had been condemned, for an offence against morals, to make
confession of the same to the Consistory of Geneva, to kneel to the
President of the Consistory, be reprimanded, and ask pardon. He
confessed, but more than that he declined to do.
The mode of punishment has long been decided to be an unwise one.
Voltaire, always in advance of his age, considered it an unwise one
then. He took the part of Covelle, who personally was a wretched
creature, as deficient in brains as in morals. But he stood for a cause.
After having been remanded for a fortnight for consideration, he
presented to the Consistory a paper, the substance of which had been
supplied by Voltaire, and which stated that the ecclesiastical laws did
not compel kneeling to the Consistory, being reprimanded by it, or
asking pardon from it.
Covelle published this statement, or rather Voltaire did, and between my
Lord of Ferney and the authorities began a battle of pamphlets. They
fill three large volumes, and may still be seen in Geneva. Voltaire also
wrote twelve public letters in the name of Covelle, allowed him a small
pension, and then made him the hero of “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The hatred expressed in that poem redounded, as hatred is apt to do, on
the hater. Bitterness and anger are not gay. They spoilt, artistically,
“The Civil War of Geneva.”
The poem is, unluckily for Voltaire, not only a satire on parties,
though it is a satire on that retrograde and conservative faction which
he held was ruining Geneva. It is also a savage satire against
individuals. It attacks with a sudden blind fury (Voltaire having
hitherto been temperate in his dislike of him) “that monster of vanity
and contradictions, of pride and of meanness,” Jean Jacques Rousseau. It
tore Vernet’s reputation to shreds. It descended to personal insult,
and, that there might be no possible mistake, its victims were spoken of
by name. The malice kills the wit. More indecent than the “Pucelle,”
“The War of Geneva” is much less clever and amusing. A picture of a
travelling Englishman, that Lord Abingdon who had introduced Wilkes at
Ferney and must needs put _his_ spoke into the wheel of the Genevan
party quarrels, is certainly happy. The young gentleman who, with his
“phlegmatic enthusiasm,” drags his dogs and his boredom all over Europe,
and expects, no matter where he is, the mere fact of his being English
to remove all obstacles and alter all conditions which he is pleased to
dislike, will be certainly recognised as a type.
But as a whole “The Civil War of Geneva” contains Voltaire’s vices
without his virtues. The poem, like all his writings, certainly _did_
something. In 1769 the decree to which Covelle had refused to submit was
abolished. “The War of Geneva,” which was brought out canto by canto,
appeared complete in 1768.
The strife of parties which that poem celebrated, and should have
celebrated exclusively, had not been healed by the mediators sent by
France. Very well, says France--if persuasion will not do, we will try
force. By the January of 1767 French troops were quartered along the
Lake of Geneva with the view of bringing the aggravating little Genevan
republic to its senses by famine and blockade, and unlucky, and
comparatively innocent, Ferney was almost unable to get the necessaries
of life.
Voltaire was not the person to starve in silence. The soldiers were
spoiling the trees in his park; poor d’Aumard could not get his
plasters; Adam was very ill and could have neither doctor nor medicine
(“so he is sure to recover”); and the household generally lacked
everything except snow, “and we have enough of that to stock Europe.”
Choiseul must be written to! Voltaire wrote to him and pointed out that
it was not the Genevans France was punishing, but Ferney; and on January
30th Choiseul sent an order exempting Ferney from the general rule and
giving Voltaire an unlimited passport for himself and his household.
It was a very large one by now. Durey de Morsan, an amiable elderly
ne’er-do-weel, had joined it, and lived there on Voltaire’s charity,
sometimes doing a little copying in return for his board and lodging.
There was also a _protégé_ of Richelieu’s, called Gallien, who repaid
Voltaire’s hospitality with the basest ingratitude; and an ex-Capuchin
monk, known to Ferney as Richard, who, when he had been generously
entertained for two years, decamped with money, manuscripts, and jewels
belonging to his host.
And then, besides its regular inmates, there poured through the house a
continual stream of visitors. In 1766 there had stayed there Madame
Saint-Julien, a gay, good-natured, and highly connected little lady,
whom Voltaire called his “butterfly philosopher”; and La Borde,
playwright for himself, and first _valet de chambre_ for the King.
Here, too, also in 1766, had come James Boswell, Esquire, of Auchinleck,
for whose benefit M. de Voltaire is pleased to assume the manner and
style of Mr. Boswell’s great patron, and to speak of that patron as “a
superstitious dog.”
Voltaire would hardly have been his vain old French self if he had not
modified his opinion of the great Doctor when Boswell told him that
Johnson had said that Frederick the Great wrote as Voltaire’s footboy,
who had acted as his amanuensis, might do.
To be sure, when Boswell got home and asked the Doctor if he thought
Rousseau as bad a man as Voltaire, that staunch old bigot had replied,
“Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between
them.”
But Voltaire did not know of that answer.
Also in 1766, Grétry the musician, then only five-and-twenty, had often
come over from Geneva, where he was staying, to visit Voltaire. Madame
Cramer had first introduced him. The conversation often turned on comic
opera, which Voltaire had once hated, but which, as expounded by Grétry,
he was soon to love and at seventy-four to write gaily himself.
When Grétry spoke of his host’s prodigious reputation, he records that
Voltaire characteristically replied that he would give a hundred years
of immortality for a good digestion.
Chabanon, friend of d’Alembert, musician, poet, dramatist, had also paid
a first visit here in 1766. He came back again on May 1, 1767, and
stayed seven months. He has left behind him a good account of that
visit. He evidently guessed--what not all Voltaire’s friends did
guess--that one day the world would be interested in them only as having
known Voltaire, and would be grateful to them for writing as little
about themselves, and as much about their host, as possible.
While Chabanon was at Ferney, the leisure Voltaire’s “devouring ardour”
for study allowed him was spent, of course, in play-acting. He had just
written a new play, “The Scythians,” and loved it as he always loved his
latest born. He was not a little disgusted when Ferney would have none
of it, and demanded an old favourite, “Adélaïde du Guesclin,” instead.
“I cannot think what they see in that ‘Adélaïde,’” says its author
discontentedly to Madame Denis.
Ferney and Chabanon only ratified the judgment of Paris in disliking
“The Scythians.” Played there on March 26th of this same 1767, the rude
_parterre_ had “no respect for the old age which had written it,” and
made such a noise that the first performances were “regular battles.”
There were only four in all.
The French officers of the blockading troops came _en masse_ to Ferney
in this spring to witness the theatricals. Colonel Chabrillant, the
colonel of Conti’s regiment, stayed for a long time as a guest at the
château; and if he did, after the visit, forget to write a single word
of thanks to his host or Mama Denis, why, that was a sort of ingratitude
to which Voltaire should have been accustomed.
Three companies of the same regiment were quartered in the village of
Ferney, and some of the grenadiers often came as audience to the
performances, and at least once as actors. As a reward for their
services Voltaire gave them supper and offered them money.
“We will not take anything,” they said “We have seen M. de Voltaire.
That is our payment.”
The celebrity was as delighted as a boy. My “brave grenadiers!” he
cried, and invited them all, whenever they wanted a meal or well-paid
work, to come to Ferney.
When his guests were tired of acting themselves, they could, and did,
now go to Geneva and see other people act. Through the influence of
Voltaire upon M. de Beauteville, that French envoy had so far worked
upon the prim Councils of Geneva that they had allowed a theatre to be
opened in their Puritan town in April, 1766. “Olympie” was played there,
and the loveliest comic operas. Voltaire had the whole troupe come to
Ferney, where they acted four for his benefit. The Geneva theatre had
only a short life. It was burnt in February, 1768. The townspeople hated
it so, that when they saw it in flames they made no attempt to save it.
In the light of subsequent events, it seems almost certain that Voltaire
received many of his visitors and gave many of his entertainments to
keep Madame Denis in a good temper, and reconcile her to the country
which she hated; while other festivities he arranged for the benefit of
the light-hearted young people he always liked to have about him.
When there was a supper and a dance after theatricals he himself
appeared for a moment only, and then retired to his room, which adjoined
that where, not the guests, but the servants were dancing, and where he
tranquilly worked or slept to the sound of the music. Sometimes he did
not even appear to do the honours of the house at all; and declared of
himself that he would have been dead in four days if he had not well
known how to live quietly in the midst of uproar, and alone in a mob.
He had the usual quarrel on hand to keep him busy. That conceited La
Beaumelle, who had been a thorn in his flesh in Prussia, assailed him in
the summer of 1767 with no fewer than ninety-four abusive anonymous
letters. Voltaire put the matter into the hands of the police. But in
1770 La Beaumelle, who had further complicated the situation by marrying
the sister of young Lavaysse, the Calas’ unfortunate friend, began an
objectionable commentary on Voltaire’s works, and would have finished it
but that he (La Beaumelle) died in 1773.
That Voltaire spent energy and time in trying to inspire, and that he
knew no greater delight than when he did inspire, his visitors with his
own passion for hard work in place of idle pleasure, is on the testimony
of Chabanon and of a fellow-visitor of Chabanon’s, the famous La Harpe.
La Harpe from the first came to Ferney to be a brilliant pupil to this
great past master of so many arts; to learn from the author of “Zaire”
and of “Alzire,” of “Mahomet” and of “Mérope,” of “The Princess of
Navarre,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Brutus,” and “The Scotch Girl,” how to
write every kind of play that ever playwright has written. It has been
mentioned that La Harpe had been at Ferney in 1765--part of the time
with that noblest exponent of the drama, Clairon. He was here also in
1766 with Chabanon. And now, in the beginning of 1767, he came once
again--this time with his young wife, and for a visit which lasted more
than a year.
La Harpe was a clever, arrogant, and very self-satisfied young man of
about eight-and-twenty. His tragedy, “Warwick,” produced in 1763, made
him famous in his own age. In this, he is only celebrated as the first
writer in France who “made criticism eloquent.” He had led a
disreputable youth, and had just married his landlady’s daughter as a
reparation for wrong done to her. But in that age almost everybody was
disreputable; and if virtue had been a _sine qua non_ in society, there
would have been no society at all.
Voltaire took this promising youth to his warm and sanguine old heart at
once. He was poor! He was clever! He could act! What more did one want?
With Voltaire’s help he had gained a prize at the Academy. And with
further help he should do greater things than that. Nothing is
pleasanter in Voltaire’s character as an old man than the enthusiastic
interest and delight he took in his young literary _protégés_. He worked
with them, corrected them, praised them, went into raptures over their
talents to his friends, financed them, fathered them, housed them, and
in the desire for their fame quite forgot his own.
The memorable La Harpe visit of 1767 opened under the rosiest aspects.
The little bride had the youth in which Voltaire delighted, and she
turned out to be “a comedian without knowing it.” If “The Scythians” had
been hissed in Paris, Madame de la Harpe reciting Act II. made Ferney
sob. La Harpe, too, “declaimed verses as well as he wrote them,” and was
“the best actor in France.”
So there were theatricals galore.
If thorns pricked on the rose stems and there were clouds in the bluest
of skies, it was not Voltaire who spoke of them.
It is Chabanon, the fellow-guest, who sketches La Harpe as overbearing,
impatient of correction, uncommonly quarrelsome, and quite forgetful of
the fact that his host’s position and seniority of nearly fifty years
demanded some sort of respect.
Old Voltaire was good-natured enough to criticise the young man’s plays
for him, and La Harpe received the criticisms with the sulkiness of
offended dignity. Voltaire was not patient by nature, heaven knows. But
he kept his coolness and his temper with this irritating young man to a
degree quite extraordinary. It was always “the little La Harpe,” or “my
dear child,” or “Ah! the little one is angry!” with a good-natured
laugh.
When one day the conceited visitor went so far as to rewrite some verses
in his part in Voltaire’s “Adélaïde”--“which seemed to me feeble”--“Let
us hear them, my son,” says Voltaire. And when he had heard them, as
improved by La Harpe--
“Good,” he said. “Yes, that is better. Go on making such changes. I
shall only gain by them.”
On another occasion, La Harpe, at a dinner-party of twenty persons,
recited an ode by one old foe of Voltaire’s, Pompignan, on the death of
another, J. B. Rousseau, without stating the name of the author.
“Very good,” says Voltaire. “Who wrote it?”
The audacious La Harpe makes him guess. And at last tells him.
“Pompignan.”
That name, as La Harpe himself said, was a _coup de théâtre_ indeed.
There was a silence. “Repeat the lines again,” says Voltaire. As La
Harpe repeats them, the Patriarch listens with fixed attention. “There
is no more to be said. It _is_ a beautiful stanza.”
Was this the same man whom the mere suggestion that d’Arnaud’s sun was
rising and his setting, had spurred to the folly of the Prussian visit?
Was this the man so thin-skinned that every gnat-bite of a criticism
made him raw and mad? The truth seems to be that Voltaire had a very
weak spot in his heart for La Harpe, and loved him better than his own
glory.
Not many years ago, in a grocer’s shop in Paris, was discovered an
autograph letter of Voltaire’s in which he begged the Controller-General
for a pension for his _protégé_.
“It seems to me that, M. de la Harpe having no pension, mine (from the
King) is too large by half, and that it should be divided between us.”
If this could be arranged--“La Harpe, and everyone else, can easily be
made to think that this pension is a just recompense for the services he
has rendered to literature.”
The request was not granted. La Harpe never even knew that it had been
made. But its singular generosity and delicacy are not altered by those
facts. Well might Voltaire’s bitterest enemy, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
write of him: “I know no man on earth whose impulses have been more
beautiful.”
But his treatment of La Harpe was something better even than a noble
impulse.
In the beginning of 1768, after the young couple had been guests in his
house for more than a year, and after one of them at least had received
full measure, pressed down and running over, of help, forbearance, and
kindness, Voltaire discovered that valuable manuscripts had been stolen
from him. Among others were those secret Memoirs written in 1759, which
expressed the feelings of an angry, younger Voltaire, but not of a wiser
and older one. To Paris had been sent not only copies of “The Civil War
of Geneva,” but anecdotes for his Histories which Voltaire was keeping
until the death of the persons concerned left him at liberty to publish
them.
There was a loud domestic explosion at Ferney. The strongest and gravest
suspicion fell upon La Harpe. He vehemently denied everything, and
accused a certain Antoine, a sculptor, of the crime. Antoine simply said
La Harpe was a liar.
Madame Denis, who herself was suspected of a foolish elderly _tendresse_
for La Harpe and of complicity in the affair with him, took his side,
with, one may safely assume, a torrent of eloquence. But eloquence, not
proof, was all either she or La Harpe had to offer. From his room La
Harpe, “putting arrogance in the place of repentance,” wrote his
generous old host many impertinent little notes. He might have spared
him.
Voltaire had often had manuscripts stolen from him before, and always
alas! by his own familiar friends whom he trusted. But this time he felt
the treachery with peculiar bitterness. He was not passionate and
furious as he generally was. His attitude was that of knowing La Harpe
to be guilty and longing to find him innocent. He made as little of it
as he could. “This little roguery of La Harpe’s is not serious,” he
wrote. “But it is certain and proven.” In the November of 1767 La Harpe
had been in Paris for a time, when “he gave the third canto of ‘The
Civil War of Geneva’ to three persons of my acquaintance.”
“I did not reproach him,” Voltaire wrote sadly to Hennin, “but his own
conscience did. He never alluded to the affair and looked me straight in
the face, or spoke of it without turning pale with a pallor not that of
innocence.” Still, if I can help him in the future as I have done in the
past, I shall do so; “only, if Madame Denis brings him back to Ferney I
must lock up my papers.” “His imprudence has had very disagreeable
consequences for me, but I pardon him with all my heart; he has not
sinned from malice.”
Only to his intimate friends did he admit La Harpe had sinned at all.
The sinner was dear to him. He must lie, if need be, to prove his
innocence to the world.
Naturally, the La Harpes had to go away. And since they must go, would
it not be better for their accomplice, Denis, to go too? It was not her
first offence. She had helped Ximenès to steal manuscripts in 1754.
Then, too, she was bored to death with Ferney; and her “natural aversion
to a country life,” wrote poor Voltaire “in confidence” to her sister,
had had very ill effects upon her temper. Not all the _fêtes_ and the
visitors could make up to her for Paris. Voltaire said that he had been
the innkeeper of Europe for fourteen years and was tired of the
profession. “This tumult does not suit my seventy-four years or my
feebleness.” “Madame Denis has need of Paris.” Here was one excuse for
getting rid of her. And if more were wanted, there was her health which
required the air of the capital and fashionable doctors; there were
business affairs there which she might see to for her uncle; and a
necessity of economising at Ferney brought about by her extravagance,
and “muddle, which,” said Grimm, “is carried by Mama Denis to a degree
of perfection difficult to imagine.”
To his friends Voltaire gave her health and the business to be looked
after in Paris as reasons for her visit. They were that lesser part of
the truth which is useful to conceal the greater. If he was loyal to La
Harpe, so he was to Madame Denis. Of her share in the theft of the
manuscripts he uttered not a word.
He gave her twenty thousand francs to spend in Paris, over and above the
yearly income which he had settled on her.
Before March 1, 1768, the two La Harpes, Madame Denis, Marie Dupuits,
and her husband, who had fallen under the ban of suspicion too, and
declined to utter a word or give an iota of evidence on either side, had
all started for the capital.
Voltaire dismissed the servants--except a couple of lacqueys and a
valet. He sold his horses. “An old invalid recluse” had no need of them.
Seven visitors who were staying in the house at the time, seeing their
host’s evident need of solitude, tactfully departed. There only remained
Father Adam, faithful Wagnière, a colleague of Wagnière’s called
Bigex--a Savoyard, who had formerly been trusted servant and copyist in
the service of Grimm--and two of the usual ne’er-do-weels, de Morsan and
an ex-American officer called Rieu. Both these persons seem to have
suppressed themselves with great success when they were not wanted, and
to have been regarded by their benefactor as part of the household
effects. He always spoke of himself as being entirely alone. Ferney was
cleaned and put in order, and the stream of visitors ceased to flow.
It was certainly not because Voltaire was idle, but because his
seventy-four years did not prevent him still being what the French call
_malin_, that this Easter he decided to do what he had done at Colmar:
play once more that ‘deplorable comedy,’ _faire ses Pâques_.
A priest was dining with him one night at Ferney. “Father D----,” says
Voltaire, “I wish, for example’s sake, _faire mes Pâques_ on Easter Day.
I suppose you will give me absolution?”
“Willingly,” says the priest. “I give it you.” No more was said.
On Easter Day, 1768, Voltaire, accompanied by Wagnière and two
gamekeepers, went solemnly to church, preceded by a servant carrying “a
superb Blessed Loaf” which the Lord of Ferney was in the habit of
presenting every Easter Sunday. After the distribution of this bread
Voltaire mounted the pulpit and turned round and preached a little
sermon. Protestant Wagnière had warned him against doing this. He felt
sure it was illegal. But his master’s mood was a wicked one; and,
moreover, several thefts had been committed of late in his parish while
all the people were at church, which gave him a text. His remonstrances
were “vigorous, pathetic, and eloquent,” and he warmly exhorted the
people to the practice of virtue. The unhappy curé, not knowing what to
do, hurried to the altar and proceeded with the mass. Voltaire spoke a
few words in his praise, and then got down from the pulpit and resumed
his own seat.
The story got noised abroad. Good Marie Leczinska mistook it for a
conversion. The philosophers for once were at one with the orthodox, and
condemned the deed. And so of course did Biort, Bishop of Annecy, who
was also Prince and Bishop of Geneva, and of whose diocese Ferney was
part.
In that wicked world of the eighteenth century there were few good
bishops. But the Prelate of Annecy was one of them. He was also of
strong character and of sound judgment and reason, with a fine capacity
for irony.
On April 11, 1768, he wrote Voltaire a very excellent letter. He could
not take, he said, as hypocrisy a deed which, if hypocritical, would
tarnish a great man’s glory and make him despicable in the eyes of all
thoughtful persons. “I hope your future life will give proof of the
integrity and sincerity of your act”; and then, in language of great
dignity and even beauty, he attempted to recall the sinner to a sense of
sin, and reminded him of that hour which could not now be far distant,
when the faith would be his only hope, and his fame and glory the
shadows of a dream.
Voltaire replied on April 15th, purposely misunderstanding the Bishop’s
letter and taking his remarks as compliments. He felt the act needed
excuse. To d’Alembert, who was as freethinking as any man in Paris, he
wrote apologetically, that, finding himself between two
fourteenth-century bishops, he was obliged to “howl with the wolves.”
He abused Biort as a fanatic and an imbecile. But he knew very well that
he was neither. He was not so imbecile, at least, that he put any faith
in a devout and serious letter M. de Voltaire was pleased to write to
him on April 29th, and replied on May 2d in terms which showed very
clearly that he knew his Voltaire--to the soul.
He had already issued a mandate to the clergy of his diocese forbidding
them to give the Sacrament to this profane person. He now sent the whole
correspondence to the King, and, as the only punishment adequate to the
offence, he begged for a _lettre de cachet_ for M. de Voltaire.
Saint-Florentin was bidden to write the culprit a formal epistle, saying
that the King strongly condemned “this enterprise” on the part of his
ex-Gentleman-in-Ordinary. But there was no _lettre de cachet_. The
incident had amused the Court. _That_ covered a multitude of sins.
For the time the affair was over. But alas! only for the time.
Though there were few visitors in Madame Denis’s absence, there were
some. In the August of this 1768 two very lively young men, both about
twenty years old, came over from Geneva to call upon the Patriarch of
Ferney. One of them, named Price, told a friend more than forty years
after, the little he recollected of the occasion. His companion was then
known as the son of Lord Holland, but later and now as Charles James
Fox. He had first visited Ferney in 1764 when he was sixteen.
Voltaire was delighted to see his visitors, but, as usual, declared that
they had only come to bury him; and though he walked about the garden
and drank chocolate with them, did not invite them to dinner.
The only part of their conversation Price recollected after that
interval of forty years was that the host gave them the names of such of
his works as might open their minds and “free them from religious
prejudice,” adding, “Here are the books with which to fortify
yourselves.”
Charles paid other visits to Ferney, and Voltaire soon learnt to love
him, as all the world loved that generous and brilliant youth. “Yʳ son
is an English lad and j an old Frenchman,” the Patriarch wrote to Lord
Holland after Charles’s next visit. “He is healthy and j sick. Yet j
love him with all my heart, not only for his father but himself.”
Voltaire gave the young man dinner this time, in his “little caban”; and
Charles became a _persona grata_ at Ferney, as in all the world.
Another Englishman with whom Voltaire was brought into relation in the
summer of 1768 was Horace Walpole. Voltaire had seen Horace’s “Historic
Doubts on Richard III.,” and characteristically wrote that it was fifty
years since _he_ took a vow to doubt, and reminded Horace that he had
known his father and uncle in England. Horace sent a copy of his book,
and the correspondence drifted on to that favourite topic of contention
between literary Englishmen and Voltaire--Shakespeare. Voltaire, who
wrote in his own language--what need to write in English to “the best
Frenchman ever born on English soil”?--pointed out with just pride in
reply that he had been the first to make Shakespeare, Locke, and Newton
known to the French, and that, in spite of the persecutions of a clique
of fanatics. “I have been your apostle and your martyr: truly English
people have no reason to complain of me.”
If some new friends came into Voltaire’s life in this solitary 1768,
more old ones went out of it.
On June 24th of this year died Marie Leczinska. Friend? Well, once.
There was that pension _sur sa cassette_, and “my poor Voltaire.”
In the autumn died Olivet--a friend indeed--the best of Latinists, the
kindly schoolmaster at Louis-le-Grand.
In December, that silent staunch laborious worker for the philosophic
faith, Damilaville, met death with the resolute courage with which he
had faced life, and left the world poorer for one of those rare people
who say nothing and do much.
Voltaire mourned him as a public as well as a personal loss. He mourned
him characteristically--that such a man should die while Fréron waxed
fat! But since they did, the less time to sit idle and weeping.
Up then, and at them with those little deadly arrows of which the
Voltairian quiver was always full--the arrows called Pamphlets.